From an early age Rupert Spira was deeply interested in the nature of reality.

At the age
of seventeen he learnt to meditate, and began a twenty-year period of study and practice
in the classical Advaita Vedanta tradition under the guidance of Dr. Francis Roles and
Shantananda Saraswati, the Shankaracharya of the north of India.

During this time he immersed himself in the teachings of P. D. Ouspensky, Krishnamurti,

Rumi, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta and Robert Adams, until he met his teacher,
Francis Lucille, in 1997. Francis introduced Rupert to the Direct Path teachings of
Atmananda Krishna Menon, the Tantric tradition of Kashmir Shaivism (which he had
received from his teacher, Jean Klein), and, more importantly, directly indicated to him
the true nature of experience. Rupert lives in the UK and holds regular meetings and
retreats in Europe and the USA.

‘All that is known is experiencing, and experiencing is not divided into one part (an
inside self) that experiences and another part (an outside object, other or world) that is
experienced. Experiencing is seamless and intimate, made of knowing or Awareness
alone. This intimacy, in which there is no room for selves, objects or others, is love
itself. It lies at the heart of all experience, completely available under all
circumstances.’

– RUPERT SPIRA
SAHAJA PUBLICATIONS

PO Box 887, Oxford OX1 9PR

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A co-publication with New Harbinger Publications

5674 Shattuck Ave.
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Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

First published by Non-Duality Press 2011

Second edition by Sahaja Publications 2016

Copyright © Rupert Spira 2016

All rights reserved

No part of this book shall be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval system without written permission of the publisher

Designed by Rob Bowden

Printed in Canada

ISBN 978–1–62625–879–2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file with publisher

I would like to thank all those who have helped, directly or indirectly, with the
publication of this book – in particular, Ellen Emmet, Chris Hebard, Ramesam
Vemuri, Ed Kelly, Loren Eskenazi, Julian Noyce, Iain and Renate McNay, Tom
Tarbert, Caroline Seymour, Ruth Middleton, Victoria Ritchie, Rob Bowden,
Jacqueline Boyle and John Prendergast.
Pure intimacy
Parted by thought
Becomes a self and world
CONTENTS

Introduction: The Seamless Intimacy of Experience

The Primacy of Presence

Knowledge and Love Are One
The Innocence of Experience
The Pure ‘I’ of Awareness
Awareness and Its Apparent Objects
The Imaginary Centre of Perception
The Imaginary Birth of the Self and the World
We Were Not Born
Love Is the Fabric of Experience
Everything Is Folded Back into Presence
All We Ever Long For
The Many Names of God
Is the World Within?
The Shadow of the Separate Self
The Amness of Self Is the Isness of Things
Reality Is Not Mysterious
Awareness Always Knows Itself
There Is No Real Ignorance
Nothing Ever Disappears
Pure, Unclouded Awareness
The Burnt Rope
The True Revolution
Conceptualising Consciousness
Presence Finds Only Itself
The Fabric of Identity
Utterly, Intimately One
We Never Lose a Friend
Abiding Knowingly As Presence
Presence Breathes Out the World
Devotion
The Arch Impersonator
The Apparent Forgetting of Our Own Being
The Natural State of Openness and Transparency
Our True Security
The Recognition of Being
Who Is
Is This the Final Understanding?
The Dissolution of Thought in Its Own Substance
Does Life Have a Purpose?
The Seed of Separation
Offering Everything to Presence
Love Only Knows Itself
Person, Witness, Substance, Presence
We Do Not Know What Anything Is
There Is Only Pure Intimacy
The Ever-Present Reality of Existence
Addiction and Non-Duality
Nobody Has, Owns or Chooses Anything
Experience’s Experience of Itself
Introduction: The Seamless Intimacy of Experience

In 1998 I was staying with my friend and teacher, Francis Lucille, and we were talking
about the nature of experience. At one point a dog started to bark in the distance and I
observed that it seemed a fact of experience that the dog was outside, separate and at a
distance from myself.
Francis said to me, ‘Shut your eyes and place your hands on the carpet.’ I placed my
hands on the carpet and he asked, ‘Now, where does that sensation take place?’ That
was all he said.
At that moment it suddenly became clear that the sensation of the carpet was inside me,
that is, inside this perceiving Consciousness, appearing in exactly the same place as my
thoughts and bodily sensations.
When I opened my eyes the carpet appeared to be outside again. However, I reasoned
that the carpet was only one thing. As a sensation it seemed to be inside but as a visual
perception it seemed to be outside. Well, which was it? It couldn’t be both.
In this way I explored and experimented with my experience, always with the same
question in mind, ‘What is the real nature of this experience?’ I didn’t want a rational
response, couched in the non-dual terms that had become so familiar over two decades
of seeking. I wanted direct experience.
I would sit for hours refusing the conventional labels that thinking superimposes on
experience, allowing experience to reveal itself as it is. As time went on it became
more and more obvious that all experience takes place inside Consciousness, that is,
inside myself, whatever that is.
In due course I came to see in an experiential way that if there is nothing outside
experience there can be nothing inside, for inside and outside are two sides of the same
coin. One cannot stand without the other. Experiencing simply remains, neither inside
nor outside, and the totality of this experiencing is permeated with, inseparable from
and ultimately made out of Consciousness, our self. In fact, it is misleading to have three
words, experiencing, Consciousness and our self, for that which is always one.
Nothing extraordinary happened except the falling away of the concepts with which we
normally describe our experience and with which we artificially fragment experience
into a perceiving subject on the inside and a perceived object, other or world on the
outside.
Over a period of time there were many revelations about the nature of experience, each
one seeming to penetrate more deeply to its core. As a result, the old belief systems
with which experience had been shrouded for so long were slowly dismantled.
During this time the fabric of the separate, inside self became clear and with it the so-
called separate, outside world. The separate self was revealed as a dense and intricate
network of resisting, fearing, avoiding, seeking and conceptualising. In other words, it
became clear that the separate self is not in fact an entity but rather an activity that
appears in Consciousness.
As a natural corollary to this understanding, it became clear that all we know of an
outside world is sensing and perceiving, which, although seeming to take place outside,
in fact take place within Consciousness, in exactly the same place as the resisting and
seeking that characterise the separate self. In both cases, whether I looked inside or
outside, it became clear that there is only the seamless intimacy of pure experiencing
itself.
It was clearly seen that Consciousness pervades all experience equally. No part of
experience is any closer to or farther from Consciousness than any other part. In fact,
there are no parts to experience. It is one seamless, intimate whole, permeated by and
ultimately made out of Consciousness.
All that changed was that a centre or location, where thinking, sensing, perceiving,
feeling, loving, acting and so on take place, was no longer imagined. The continual
reference to a personal self fell away and with it the imaginary distance, objectivity and
otherness of the world. Only experiencing remains…direct, intimate, vibrant and
friendly.
The title of my first book, The Transparency of Things, came to me as a way of trying to
indicate that all our so-called objective experience – the body, the world, things and
others – is made out of the same transparent, open, empty, luminous substance as the
Consciousness in which it appears.
The current title, Presence, goes a step further. There are no ‘things’ there in the first
place to be transparent or otherwise. There is simply aware Presence, ever-present,
knowing, being and loving itself, sometimes resting, as it were, in the knowing of its
own being and sometimes simultaneously knowing, being and loving itself in and as
every minute gesture of the apparent mind, body and world.

In trying to share or communicate this experiential understanding, it is legitimate and in

most cases necessary to have the freedom, sensitivity and flexibility to begin at any
point along the apparent paths of understanding or love, depending on the perspective of
the question, and to explore the nature of experience from there, taking the presumption
that is concealed in the question as a starting point.
In Volume II this flexibility is reflected in a more freely flowing, less structured
presentation of the teaching than in Volume I. Most of what is said in this book has been
prompted by questions, because without a question there is little impulse to formulate
what cannot truly be formulated. Starting, in most cases, from the underlying
presumption in a question, the essays go on to express as direct a formulation of the
nature of experience as is possible in the given circumstance.
However, it may not go there in one leap. It may involve an apparent process in time in
which we move slowly, intimately and carefully from our presumptions, whether they be
in the form of beliefs or feelings, to our direct experience. How long we take and how
directly we go depends on the nature of the resistance of the dualising mind that is being
engaged in this conversation. We may go straight to the reality of our experience in the
shortest and most direct way, or we may proceed slowly and not quite make the full
exploration, leaving that to be completed by the one who is asking the question.
Thus the reality of our experience is refracted into as many formulations as there are
questions, none of them being absolutely true but each one tailored with love and
understanding to the presumptions that are concealed and expressed in the question. So
our conversations are like a dance, intimately, subtly and lovingly following the
dualising mind in all its abstract, convoluted and erroneous beliefs, dancing with it for
as long as it wishes to dance, never trying to replace one concept with another that is
deemed to be absolutely true, but all the time using concepts to dissolve the hardened
shell of abstract thinking in which our experience seems to have been imprisoned,
thereby leaving the raw reality of experience naked, as it were, shining in and by itself.
In this way we avoid the pitfall of non-dual perfectionism, or responding to all
questions with the same absolute truth (as if the absolute truth could be accurately
expressed by any formulation). Although seemingly unassailable, such a formulation
may be just another refuge for the sense of a separate self. If we remain free from the
new convention of non-dual perfectionism it becomes abundantly clear that the reality of
experience cannot be adequately formulated by the mind. The little imperfections in
every phrase of the responses are repeated reminders of this.
In fact, words are the least part of what is being communicated here, although they may
temporarily assume more importance than they deserve because we are confined here to
the written word. It is the experiential understanding from which the words arise that is
their true import, and this leaves open the possibility of a wide variety of expressions
and formulations, including even those that may seem to condone a belief in the
independent existence of objects, entities, things and the world.
Any teaching that mechanically asserts and reasserts the same absolute truth as a blanket
answer to all questions is at best dogmatic and at worst dubious. The true non-dual
understanding is like an explosion – it cannot be contained in any form. It is always
uprooting any attempt of the mind to catch it, tie it down, package it or control it. This
explosion may be fierce, but it may just as well be a gentle, almost imperceptible
dissolving.
My hope is that these words will be like drinking a delicious old wine. We take small
sips with long pauses in between, and the wine percolates into the mind and body,
pervading and dissolving them as it goes. Such are the words of the teaching. It is the
aftertaste that truly matters. Long after the words have gone, the silence from which they
originate and with which they are saturated resonates in the mind and body, drawing
them into itself.
THE PRIMACY OF PRESENCE

Experience is all that is known or could be known. So let us start here. Where else
could we start? What is the reality of this current experience?
There are these words and all the other apparent objects of the mind, body and world,
that is, thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions. And there is ‘something’ present
which is seeing these words and experiencing whatever else is being experienced in
this moment. This ‘something’ is experiencing the tingling sensation we call our feet; it
is hearing the sound of rain; it is knowing our thoughts.
Whatever it is that is experiencing the current amalgam of thoughts, sensations and
perceptions is undoubtedly present and is therefore sometimes referred to as being. It is
undoubtedly knowing, experiencing or aware, and is therefore sometimes referred to as
Consciousness or Awareness. Above all, it is what we know and experience our self to
be and is therefore known as ‘I’.
Every experience is, as it were, lit up and simultaneously known by our self, this aware
Presence. Without it no experience is possible. Our self is the knowing or experiencing
aspect in every experience. It is also the being or existence aspect of all experience –
the ‘amness’ of the self and the ‘isness’ of all seeming things.
Experiences are changing all the time, but experiencing is present throughout these
changes. Would it be possible to experience the absence of this experiencing? No! In
order to claim legitimately that experiencing was absent, we would have to experience
its absence, so by definition experiencing would be present.
Would it be possible to experience the beginning or end of experiencing? If we claim
that experiencing begins or ends, something must be present there to experience its
beginning or ending. If we stay close to experiencing, which is always now, we see that
it is only abstract thought that claims that experiencing begins and ends. It is, in fact,
ever-present.
Does experiencing change when the particular characteristics of experiences change?
No! It is present consistently throughout all changes. Therefore, experiencing itself
cannot be made out of something that changes, such as a thought, sensation or
perception.

Everything that is known or experienced is known by or through our self, aware

Presence. In time, this Presence is understood to be the only substance present in
experiencing.
Our self, Presence, is the most intimate fact of experience. It pervades all experience. It
is what we refer to as ‘I’. It is what we intimately know ourself to be or, more simply, it
is the knowing of our being. Our being is not known by something or someone other than
itself. It is known by itself. The ‘I’ that I am is also the ‘I’ that knows that I am.
However, ‘I’ does not know itself as something, as an object. It is the knowing of itself.
It knows itself simply by being itself.
Presence, Consciousness, Awareness, our own being, is the primal and essential
ingredient of experience. It is that which makes all experience possible and knowable.
In time we discover that this Presence is the only ingredient of experience; it is not itself
an ingredient, something that experience is made of, but rather it simply is experience,
all alone.
Is our self, our own being, ever not present? Prior to the arising of thought, there is no
experience of time, in which our self is either present or not. Even during the
appearance of thought there is no experience of time but only the appearance of time.
And even now our self is not present in the present moment. It is the present – not ‘now’
a moment in time but eternally, timelessly ever-present now.
Would it be possible to experience the absence of our self? What would know or
experience such an absence? That one would have to be both present and aware. It
would be our self, aware Presence. Would it be possible to have an experience without
our self? Is any part of experience not utterly permeated with that which knows it? Do
we know of anything that exists apart, separate or independent from our self? No!

All experience is pervaded by experiencing or knowing. This knowingness is present

throughout all thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions irrespective of their
particular characteristics. Presence, our self, is this transparent, unchanging
knowingness in all experience.
If we remove all that is perceivable from the perceived, all that remains is our self. That
one, which is the intimacy of our being, is eternally present throughout all experience,
lending its own reality to all things. In fact, the apparent reality of all things, all
experience, belongs to our self alone. All that we love in objects, others and the world
is their reality, and their reality is our reality. We love our self alone. It is not a
personal self, a ‘me’, that loves this being. It loves its own impersonal being. All
experience is only that.
All apparently objective qualities of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell are known or
experienced by our self. Although it is undeniably present, our self cannot itself have
any objective qualities. All objective qualities are known by our self, but our self is not
made out of an object. If our self has no objective qualities, how do we know that it is
limited, located or personal? If it cannot be known, seen or felt objectively, how do we
know that it resides in the body or mind? We do not.
The mind, body and world are constantly changing in our experience and are often not
present, but our self is ever-present throughout all experience. It is the experiencing
element that runs throughout all experience. It can never be known as an object because
it is the knower of all apparent objects. However, it never ceases to know itself.
Nothing new needs to be added to experience for us to become aware that our self is
always being and knowing itself alone, not always in time but eternally now. Knowing
or experiencing is its nature. Knowing or experiencing is not what it does; it is what it
is. Simply being itself is the knowing of itself. And as our self is ever-present, it is
always knowing itself. It knows nothing other than itself.
The appearances of the mind, body and world are known by it, but our self does not
need any of these in order to know or be itself. It knows itself without the need of any
light other than its own. In fact, there is no light other than itself. Our self needs the
mind, body and world like a screen needs a film: not at all! But unlike the screen, which
is simply present, our self is a knowing or aware Presence. Just by being itself it knows
itself. It knows itself in all experience. It never ceases to experience itself.
Whatever is known or experienced in every experience is its knowing or experiencing
of itself. This absolute intimacy of itself with all apparent objects and others is known
as love. So experience is made of not only Awareness and Presence but also love.
These three are one.
All we have ever longed for resides in simply abiding knowingly as this aware
Presence.
KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE ARE ONE

In this investigation into the nature of experience we simply take our stand knowingly as
our true self of aware Presence, irrespective of the particular characteristics of
experience. We remain knowingly what we always already are. We always are only this
Presence, though we sometimes fail to notice that this is so.
What is it that fails to notice this? Our self cannot fail to know itself, just as the sun
cannot fail to illumine itself. It is only a thought that imagines that our self is not known
and that something else – like a body, mind or world – is known. With this thought
alone, our self seems to contract inside the body and mind, and objects, others and the
world seem to be projected outside. As a result, intimacy is veiled, love is lost and
seeking begins.
However, all this is only for thought. Our self knows only the intimacy of its own being,
and all experience is that. The apparent veiling of our self and the corresponding
disappearance of peace, happiness and love is always for thought, that is, always for the
imaginary inside self, and never for the real and only self there is.
First we notice our self, then we stand knowingly as that self, then we see that there is
only our self. And what is it that sees this? Our self. Our own being abides in its eternal
nature of peace, happiness and love and no longer loses itself to the apparent objects of
the body, mind and world.
The more we notice our self, the more its qualities are revealed in our experience. The
mind, body and world, which once seemed to veil it, are now seen to shine with its
light. We give to our self the attention we used to give to the world, and the objects that
once seemed to limit or obscure it are now seen only to reveal or express it.
Just as in a physical object, at a relative level, all we see is the reflected light of the
sun, so in reality all that is experienced is made only of our self, aware Presence. The
only difference is that the sun’s light is seen by something other than itself whilst it is
our self that experiences itself in all experience. It is not known by any other light.
Nothing objective can touch, change, affect, move, alter, destroy or manipulate our self,
aware Presence, in any way, just as the image in a mirror cannot affect the mirror. Our
self is intimately one with all experience, just as the mirror is one with the image when
it appears, and yet we are entirely independent of all appearances, just as the mirror is
independent of the image. In fact, we are not ‘intimately one with’ experience, for there
are not two things there in the first place – our self and experience – to be intimate with
each other. There is just pure, seamless intimacy – no inside self and no outside object,
world or other.
To begin with, as we take our stand knowingly as aware Presence, the mind, body and
world recede into the background. When the presence and primacy of our self has been
established, objects come close again, closer than close. They dissolve into our self and
reveal themselves as none other than the shape that our self is taking from moment to
moment. In fact, to know an apparent object of the mind, body or world, that apparent
object has to dissolve into our self, Awareness. For anything to be known, its apparent
‘thingness’ must dissolve in Awareness and become pure knowing.
It is not that an object that was once real in its own right dissolves into Awareness, but
rather that the object is understood to be only the knowing of the object – it was never
anything other than that in our experience in the first place. The only substance present
in knowing is Awareness, our self, so it is just the apparent ‘objectness’ of an object –
its ‘outsideness’, its ‘not-me-ness’, its ‘somethingness’ – that dissolves.
This dissolution is known as the experience of love. It is the falling away of the
apparent boundaries that seem to keep an object, other, person or world at a distance or
separate. Love and knowledge are thus one and the same.
THE INNOCENCE OF EXPERIENCE

Whatever it is that is seeing these words is the substance of these words. Whatever it is
that is seeing the carpet is the substance of the carpet. Whatever it is that is feeling the
chair is the substance of the chair. Conventional wisdom suggests that whatever it is that
knows any experience is distinct from the existence of whatever it is that is known. It
postulates a separate ‘I’ that knows and a separate object, other or world that is known.
In reality, there is no separate, inside ‘I’ and no separate, outside object, other or world.
There is no experience of a world, person, object or other, as such, as an entity in its
own right, independent and separate from our self, Awareness. This separation of the
knowing subject from the existence of the object is a concept made only of the thought
that thinks it.
In reality our self, Awareness, and the existence or being of an apparent object or other
are not two. They are seamlessly one. The knowing of a tree and the existence of the
tree are made out of the same stuff. This understanding is a common experience. In fact,
it is not an experience; it is all that is ever experienced. It is experience itself.
Experience is not a collection of objects known by an inside self. ‘Experience’ is just
another name for our self, Awareness. All seeming things are only our own infinite
being.
In the experience of an apparent object, other or world, the dualising mind (which is the
thought that seems to separate the knowing subject from the known object) is not
present. The mind appears as a thought after the event to which it refers. Take any
experience. By the time thought has risen to name it, the experience that is being named
has vanished. Therefore, thought can never touch experience itself, although it is made
out of it. Experience itself is always pristine, free, untouchable, unknowable by thought,
pure intimacy, vibrant, alive.
The world that thought imagines is not the real world of experience but an abstraction
that masquerades as the real thing. The real nature of experience can never be found by
the mind, and yet it is all that is ever known. This and every experience is shining with
that reality alone.
Thought misinterprets this seamless intimacy of experience and creates a knower, owner
or ‘haver’ of the experience – the separate, inside self – and a known, owned or ‘had’
object of experience – the outside object, other or world. But the utter intimacy of the
knower and the known is a well-known and familiar experience. It is what is referred to
as peace, happiness, love or beauty. In fact, it is all that is ever happening, though it
seems to be veiled by dualising thought.
Peace, happiness and love are simply the names we give to the dissolution of the
apparent distinction between the knower and the known, between the subject and the
object. We all know this from our relationships. Love is the dissolution of everything
we conceive and perceive ourself and the other to be. It is an experience of the absolute
oneness of our shared identity. In fact, our identity is not even shared – there are not two
entities there in the first place to share it. It is, I am, all alone.
When we say, ‘I fell in love’, we literally mean that we fell out of the conceptual
straightjacket in which we had previously resided, into love. We never actually fall out
of anything because we were never truly located as a separate, inside self or entity in
something, such as a body, in the first place. The separate entity is simply the prisoner
of thought.
When we fall in love, or indeed when we love, we simply recognise our self to be and
to have always been this transparent Presence in which there is no room for an object or
other. Of course, when the dualising mind reemerges from this non-subject–object
experience of love, in which it was not present, it recreates the apparently loving
subject and the apparently loved object and says, ‘I love you.’ However, the apparent ‘I’
and the apparent ‘you’ are fabrications of the mind, made only of the thought that thinks
them.

With the appearance of two apparent things (a knowing subject and a known object) our
natural identity of ever-present, transparent, infinite Presence is veiled and the
innocence and intimacy of all experience, which is known as peace, happiness or love,
is lost. We seem instead to become a separate, limited, inside self, searching in a world
that is now believed and felt to be outside, separate and ‘other’, that is, searching in the
realm of situations, objects and relationships for the peace, happiness and love that have
been lost.
At some point our search collapses and we turn round, as it were, and look towards this
one who is in search. However, it is never found. All that is found is the only self there
ever is, aware Presence, the simple knowing of our own being, unqualified by any of the
limitations that thinking seemingly superimposes upon it.
And what is it that recognises this aware Presence? Only that which is aware and
present could do so. In that simple recognition, aware Presence or Awareness knows
itself and, by the same token, is realised to be always only knowing itself. When we
return to our self in this way, the apparent entities of the person and the world dissolve,
leaving only the innocence and intimacy of experience, which is known as peace,
happiness or love.
If we now take our stand as this love and look again at the apparent objects of the mind,
body and world, we find that there is no substance present there other than the love we
intimately know our self to be, that knows itself to be. We drop out of the world as a
separate entity and reenter it as love, this utter innocence and intimacy of experience.
The experience of beauty is the same. It is the dissolution of the apparent separation
between the object or world and our self, or rather the recognition that there has never
been any such separation. When we walk out into a landscape and are melted by its
beauty, this is what is happening. Thinking comes to an end and our own being tastes
itself as it is, as the experience of beauty. It is never an object that is beautiful. It is
rather that all objects shine with the light of our own being.
Likewise, ‘understanding’ is the name that is given to this realisation when it is revealed
through the dissolution of a line of reasoning, and ‘love’ is the name we give to it when
it is revealed through the dissolution of feeling or emotion. All these words refer to the
death of the separate, inside self and the dissolution of its corollary, the outside object,
other or world. Peace, happiness, love, beauty and understanding all refer to the same
transparent, ever-present, infinite reality of experience.
THE PURE ‘I’ OF AWARENESS

Awareness is our primary, ever-present experience. Before we know anything else, we

know ‘I am’. And what is it that is aware of ‘I am’? Only that which is both present and
aware could be aware of anything. It is this presence of Awareness that I am that knows
itself. That is our most ordinary and intimate experience. It is never not known.
The idea that there is a mind independent of thinking, a body independent of sensing or a
world independent of perceiving is only a belief. The mind itself is limited, so it can
never know whether or not such a belief is true. The mind, body and world are never
experienced as they are normally conceived to be; our only experience of them is
thinking, sensing and perceiving. Thinking, sensing and perceiving are modes of
knowing or experiencing, and the only substance present in knowing or experiencing is
our self, Awareness.
Awareness is simultaneously their substance and their knowing, the being of them and
the knowing of them. The pure light of our own self, Awareness, takes the shape of
thinking and seems to become a mind, which takes the shape of sensing and seems to
become a body, and takes the shape of perceiving and seems to become an object, other
or world.
It is not sensing and perceiving that make up the body and world. It is thought that
superimposes ‘body’ and ‘world’ on the pure intimacy of sensing and perceiving.
Experience itself is too intimate and seamless ever to become a mental object (sensing
and perceiving) or a physical one (body and world) known by a separate subject. All
these labels are for the separate self that thinking imagines us to be, never for our true
and only self, which always is and knows only itself.
The projection of an outside world always remains within our self, although such is its
nature that the world seems to take place outside. As a result of the apparent division of
experience into an inside and an outside, our self, Awareness, is imagined to remain on
the inside as a separate, limited, located ‘me’ and everything that seems to be on the
other side, the outside, becomes an object, other or world, ‘not me’.
At first, Awareness seems to become the pure subject of experience, the witness, which
knows or experiences the object – the mind, body and world. Witnessing can be seen,
therefore, as a subtle superimposition that is conferred upon Awareness by the primary
division of experience in two, into a subject and an object. With a further act of
imagination, this witnessing Awareness is believed to reside inside the body, and with
this belief another, denser superimposition is conferred upon Awareness by thinking.
First, the pure ‘I’ of Awareness, which pervades all experience intimately and equally,
is subtly contracted into the witnessing ‘I’, which is conceived to be at a distance and
separate from the mind, body and world. This witnessing ‘I’ is then further reduced in
the imagination into the thinker, apparently located in a mind. That is, it is conceived as
‘I, the thinker’, ‘I, the mind’. Finally it is imagined that the mind is located inside the
body, and with this belief Awareness is imagined to reside inside, in fact to become the
body, ‘I, the feeler’, ‘I, the doer’.
Thus the pure ‘I’ of Awareness is seemingly reduced into ‘I, the witness’ and then further
reduced into ‘I, the separate, inside self’. Everything that is left over, with which
Awareness has not been identified, is conceived as the object, other or world.
In this way the intimacy and seamlessness of experiencing is divided into two apparent
things – an experiencer and an experienced, a subject and an object. The subject
becomes a witness, then a mind, then a body. The object becomes the world and all
others. Awareness seems to become located, limited and personal, and the object, other
or world seems, simultaneously, to become separate, outside and distant.
This separation between the knower and the known, the experiencer and the
experienced, the thinker and the thought, the feeler and the felt, the doer and the deed,
never actually occurs. It is imagined with the thought that thinks it.

What is sometimes known as self-enquiry proceeds in the opposite direction. It starts

with the apparently separate self that we think and feel ourself to be and simply stays
with it. In this way the self is gradually, in most cases, relieved of all the progressive
layers of superimposition with which the mind has seemingly wrapped it.
To begin with, the separate self that thinking imagines us to be is realised as the witness
of the separate self. That is, even when we think and feel that we are a separate self
inside a mind and body, we are always only the witness of the mind and body. Now we
stand as that knowingly, whereas before, when we mistook our self for a separate,
inside self, we stood as that without realising it.
As we remain as this witnessing self it loses its sense of limitation and locality, for all
limits and locations are witnessed by our self. It loses its ‘witnessing from a distance’
quality. The witnessing self and the witnessed objects of the body, mind and world
dissolve into each other and only one seamless substance remains. What we call that
substance no longer matters because there is nothing left to compare it with. The witness
cannot stand alone.
If we truly take our stand as the witnessing presence of Awareness and look at the
objects of the mind, body and world, we do not find any distance or separation between
our self, this witnessing Presence, and the objects of the mind, body or world that it
witnesses. In fact, we do not find two entities there, a witnessing Awareness and a body,
mind or world. We find only the seamlessness of experiencing, utterly one with or
pervaded by the intimacy of our own being. It only finds itself.
Awareness now no longer knows itself as the witness of all seeming things. It knows
itself as their substance. But it is not the substance of something. Our only knowledge of
an object, other or world is made of knowing or experiencing. We only know knowing,
we only experience experiencing, and the only substance present in knowing or
experiencing is our self, Awareness. There is just our self knowing itself.
Experience is seamless, made out of our own pure self alone. It is only thinking that
superimposes successive layers of limitation on our self. However, Awareness does not
become pure as a result of this process of returning to our self. The process is only for
the mind, just as the apparent limitation of our self is for the mind alone. Our self is
always only ever pure aware Presence, seemingly limited, obscured or sullied by
imagination alone.
We do not cease to be a separate self and become the witness, and likewise we do not
cease to be the witness and become pure Awareness. It is only thinking which seemingly
reduces pure Awareness to these apparently successive stages of limitation and
localisation, and it is only for thinking that these layers of ignorance, or the ignoring of
the true nature of experience, are removed. For our self, Awareness, no such thing ever
happens.
Awareness is always only ever knowing, being and loving itself. It simply now stands
revealed to itself as it is. It is always the same self.
So, as we proceed back along this projected path, in the opposite direction from which
it arose, it is understood that our only knowledge of the mind, body and world is
thinking, sensing and perceiving. And if we look more closely at the nature of thinking,
sensing and perceiving, we find that there is no substance present there other than our
self, Awareness.
The mind, body and world do not become Awareness as a result of this. They have
always only ever been what they eternally are. But now they are known and felt as such.
They are reclaimed.
As William Blake said, ‘When the doors of perception are cleansed, everything will
appear as it truly is, infinite.’
Aware Presence realises itself as the totality. Only Presence truly is.
AWARENESS AND ITS APPARENT OBJECTS

You comment that Awareness is observing appearances as though there are two
things, Awareness and appearances. Does not this admit an element of duality, albeit
one that is subtler than is conventionally the case?
The suggestion that there are two apparent things – one, Awareness, and two,
appearances or objects – is made to one who believes him or herself to be a separate
self, located in and as the body, looking out at a world of objects that are considered to
be separate from and independent of their self, Awareness.
In this case, the terms in which the question is expressed (that is, the belief in a separate
entity, object or world that has independent existence) are granted provisional
credibility so that we may proceed from what seem to be the facts of experience. In this
way an attempt is made to really connect with the questioner’s felt experience rather
than taking refuge in what may seem to some like an ivory tower of non-dual
perfectionism.
So, we start with the conventional formulation that I, inside the body, am looking out at
an objective and independent world of objects. This is a position of dualism: I, the body
(the subject), am experiencing the world and others (the object). From here our attention
is drawn to the fact that the body (sensations and perceptions) and the mind (thoughts
and images) are, in fact, experienced in exactly the same way as is the world
(perceptions). It is seen clearly that the body/mind is not the subject of experience and
the world the object, but rather that the body, mind and world are all objects of
experience.
We then ask what it is that knows or experiences the body/mind/world. Whatever it is,
is what we call ‘I’. And what is this ‘I’? It is obviously not the body/mind, because at
this stage the body/mind is understood to be experienced rather than the experiencer.
What then can we say about this knowing or experiencing ‘I’? It cannot have any
objective qualities because any such qualities would, by definition, be appearances or
objects and therefore known or experienced. However, this ‘I’ is undeniably present and
aware. For this reason it is sometimes referred to as aware Presence or Awareness.
At this stage the Awareness that I am is said to be ‘nothing’, ‘empty’ or ‘void’ because it
has no observable qualities. I am transparent, colourless Presence. I am nothing
conceivable or perceivable. I am present and aware but am not-a-thing, nothing. From
this point of view Awareness is sometimes described as the witness of the appearances
of the mind, body and world. I, Awareness, know all appearances but am not made out
of anything that appears.
This position is still dualistic for there is still a subject (my self, Awareness) and an
object (the body/mind/world). It is, as it were, a halfway stage. It is one step closer to a
truer formulation of the nature of experience than the previous one, in which the
body/mind was considered to be the subject of experience and the world was
considered the object. However, upon closer exploration, this idea of the witness is
also seen to be a limitation superimposed on Awareness by a mind that still believes in
the separate existence of objects.
It is valuable to make the distinction between Awareness (the knowing or experiencing
subject) and the appearances of the mind, body and world for two reasons. One is that it
establishes that there is something in our experience that is not an object and yet is
undeniably present and aware – the presence of Awareness – and that this is what we
are. The other reason is that it establishes not just the presence but the primacy of
Awareness, that is, that for any object of the body, mind or world to come into apparent
existence, our self, Awareness, must be present first, so to speak, as its background.
So the distinction establishes that first and foremost we stand as the objectless,
transparent Presence or Awareness that illumines and knows all appearances of the
body, mind and world. That is our ever-present experience whether we recognise it or
not.

Now we can go further than this. If we explore this Awareness that we intimately know
our self to be, that knows itself to be, we discover that there is nothing in our experience
to suggest that it is limited, located, personal, bound by time or space, or caused by or
dependent upon anything other than itself.
What is it that could know that Awareness is not limited, located and so on? Only that
which knows or is aware, and is at the same time present, could know this or indeed
anything else. Therefore, it is Awareness alone that knows itself to be unlimited,
unlocated, independent, uncaused. The recognition of our own impersonal, unlimited,
ever-present being is sometimes called awakening or enlightenment. It is the simplest
and most obvious and intimate fact of experience, but usually overlooked as a result of
our imagining our self to be something other than Awareness, such as a thought, feeling
or sensation.
Now we can look again at the relationship between Awareness and the apparent objects
of the body/mind/world that appear to it. How close are the body, mind and world to
this witnessing presence of Awareness? How close is the world to the knowing or
experiencing of it? If we look simply and directly at our experience we find that
whenever an object appears, there is no distance between our self, Awareness, and that
apparent object. They are, so to speak, touching one another.
We can go still further. What is our experience of the border between them, the interface
where they meet or touch? If there were such an interface, it would be the place where
our self ended and the object began. However, we find no such interface in experience.
There is no place where we end and our experience of the world begins. There is no
border there. Therefore, we can now reformulate our experience in a way that is closer
to our actual experience. We can say that objects do not just appear to this Awareness
but within it.
At this stage Awareness is conceived more like a vast space in which all the objects of
the body, mind and world appear and disappear. Previously we considered our self to
witness all appearances from a distance, but now this distance has collapsed and
everything is experienced as being intimate. It is no longer just our thoughts and feelings
that are experienced inside our self but also sensations and perceptions.
However, this is still a position of dualism, in which this vast knowing space is the
subject and the body, mind and world are objects that appear within it, rather as objects
appear in a room. So we again go deeply into the experience of the objects of the body,
mind and world and see if we can find in them a substance that is other than the
Awareness that knows them or in which they appear. It is an exploration in which we
come to see clearly that the body, mind and world are made of thoughts, sensations and
perceptions; thoughts, sensations and perceptions are understood to be made of thinking,
sensing and perceiving; and the only substance present in thinking, sensing and
perceiving is understood to be our self, Awareness.
There is nothing present in our experience of an object, other or world other than the
knowing of it, and knowing is made only of Awareness, our self. In fact, we don’t know
our knowing of an object; we just know knowing. The body, mind and world don’t just
appear within Awareness but as Awareness, that is, they are known to be made out of
that which knows them. They are experienced as being made out of our self, Awareness.
Even in this formulation, however, there is still a reference to objects, albeit
simultaneously known by and made out of Awareness. If we look closely we find that
Awareness, rather than objects, is our primary experience. So if we start from actual
experience, that is, from Awareness, we find that it is Awareness that takes the shape, as
it were, of the mind, body and world. Awareness takes the shape of thinking and appears
as the mind; it takes the shape of sensing and appears as the body; it takes the shape of
perceiving and appears as the world, but never for a moment does it actually become
anything other than itself.
At this stage we not only know but feel that Presence or Awareness is all there is. That
is, it knows itself as the totality of experience. This could be formulated as, ‘I,
Awareness, am everything’, or simply ‘Awareness is everything’. At the same time, we
recognise that this has always been the case, although it seemed previously not to be
known.

So, we have moved from a position in which we thought and felt that I am something (a
mind and body) to a position in which we recognised our true nature as aware Presence,
which we expressed as ‘I am nothing, not-a-thing’. Then we came to the experiential
understanding that I am not just the witness, the knower or experiencer of all things, but
also simultaneously their substance. In other words, we came to feel that I am
everything.
However, even this is not quite right, although it may be a truer formulation of our actual
experience than the ones we previously suggested, for what is this ‘everything’ that is
being referred to? We have, by this stage, already realised that there are no objects,
others, selves, entities or world that are ever actually experienced as such. So it does
not now make sense to say that Awareness is the totality of all non-existent things. There
simply are no things for Awareness to be the witness, substance or totality of.
How can we express this? We cannot! Language collapses here because understanding
has burst out of the conceptual framework that it is designed to contain. However, it is
still legitimate to try! Instead of saying that Awareness is everything, we could say just
that Awareness is, or I am. But even then, what is this Awareness that is conceptualised
as being present? To conceptualise Awareness as such is to make implicit reference to
something else that is not Awareness. It is to ascribe to Awareness a name or form in
contrast to other names and forms and thus to suggest a limitation. So we could just say,
‘is’ or ‘am’. But such a word on its own is meaningless. Words can go no further. We
fall silent.
If we were at a meeting now rather than writing and reading, there would probably be a
long period of silence. In fact, as the meeting went on we might notice a subtle shift
from experiencing periods of silence that punctuate the conversation to experiencing
periods of conversation that punctuate the silence. In time it might be seen clearly that
the words, whether spoken or written, do not punctuate or interrupt silence, but rather
that this silence is ever-present and the words are simply a modulation of it.
In other words, we might discover that true silence is not simply an absence of sound
and thought but rather the presence of Awareness that pervades and yet is prior to both
sound and thought and their absence. Even that is not quite right, because in experience
there is nothing prior. ‘Prior’ requires time, and time is only in thought. Experience is
eternally now.
Such are the limitations of language, and if we are to speak about these matters we have
to be willing to accommodate them. So we find ourselves again using the terms that
have evolved to describe the abstract and conceptual conventions of dualistic thought.
We find ourselves again speaking about that which cannot be truly spoken about and
which, at the same time, is the one thing that truly deserves our words because it is all
that truly is.
So, to summarise, we move from the formulation, ‘I am something’ to ‘I am nothing’,
from ‘I am nothing’ to ‘I am everything’, from ‘I am everything’ to ‘I am’ or ‘Awareness
is’, from there to simply ‘I’ and from ‘I’ to…we truly fall silent here.

What has just been described could be seen as series of stages in the progressive
unfolding of understanding from the belief that experience consists of a succession of
objects – the body, mind and world – to the understanding that experience is only
Awareness eternally knowing and being itself alone.
However, it would be a mistake to think that an entity passes through these apparent
stages or even that experience itself undergoes a series of transformations. Such a
position would only be the case if our initial assumption of the separate and independent
reality of entities, objects, others and the world were true. Rather, having arrived at the
understanding that there is only Awareness or Presence, it becomes simultaneously clear
that this has always been the case, even if it were not noticed.
So, looking now from this new perspective of Presence, we see that what seemed to be
an apparent unfolding of understanding from the point of view the separate self was, in
fact, a dissolution of ignorance from the point of view of the mind. Instead of starting
with the apparent reality of entities, objects, selves, others and the world and looking
towards Awareness, we now take our stand knowingly as Awareness and see how the
mind, arising within Awareness, has built up a series of abstract and conceptual beliefs
that confer apparent reality, solidity and independence on objects, others and the world.
As we abide knowingly as Awareness, that is, as it stands knowingly as itself, un-
seemingly-veiled by the abstract concepts of the dualising mind, we discover that it is
not a void, an emptiness. It is not nothing. It is only referred to as ‘nothing’ at times in
contrast to the belief in the reality of things. From that point of view it is nothing, not-a-
thing, in contrast to ‘something’.
However, from the point of view of experience, Awareness is fullness itself – full of
itself alone. This fullness is known as love, for there is no room there for any other. We
could say that love is the substance of all seeming things, and once it has become clear
that there are no real things we could simply say that love is.
The movement in understanding from ‘I am something’ to ‘I am nothing’ could be called
the path of wisdom or discrimination. The movement in understanding from ‘I am
nothing’ through ‘I am everything’ to simply ‘I’ could be called the path of love.
THE IMAGINARY CENTRE OF PERCEPTION

There is no distance between the body, mind and world and our self, aware Presence, in
which they appear.
The sound of the wind or the sight of the moon is as close and intimate to our self,
aware Presence, as the tingling of our face, the sensation of our breath, or our most
private thought or feeling. No experience of the body, mind or world appears with a
‘me’ label attached to it. The thought ‘This is me’ or ‘This is not me’ is added to the
experience of sensing and perceiving as an afterthought. It is not intrinsic to experience
itself.
Take the sensation of your hands. Without reference to thinking, is there any knowledge
that this sensation is ‘me’? Does it come with a ‘me’ label attached to it? Does the
sound of the wind come with a ‘not me’ label attached to it? Are they not both just raw
experience, raw sensation and perception, not even ‘hand’ or ‘wind’, let alone ‘me’ or
‘not me’?
It is with the thought ‘I am this, I am not that’ that the seamless intimacy of experience is
apparently divided into ‘me’ and ‘not me’, into ‘I’ and ‘other’. And even that thought is
as impersonal as the sound of the wind. The sound of the wind is as intimate as that
thought. Even the thought, ‘I am this sensation, the body, but not that perception, the
wind’ is just a thought that bears no relation to our actual experience. It has no real
power to divide the seamlessness of experience; it only seems to do so.
It is impossible to divide the seamlessness of experience. The thought that our self, this
aware Presence that is seeing these words, is located in and limited to a separate body
is itself simply a thought that appears in unlimited Presence, just like the sound of the
wind.

Is there actually an experience of a border between what is considered to be the inside

of our self and what is considered to be the outside?
The skin, which seems to house our self, Awareness, is in fact simply another sensation
or perception that itself appears in Awareness along with all other sensations and
perceptions. It is not the body that contains Awareness and separates it from the world,
but rather our true body, Awareness, that contains the body, mind and world.
See clearly that the breath takes place in this vast open space of Awareness, not in an
imagined, confined body. The breath and the body are both sensations. One sensation
does not appear in another sensation, but rather both appear within Awareness, in the
same ‘place’ that the wind appears, the placeless place of Awareness. It is only a
concept that says the breath is ‘me’ and ‘mine’ and takes place on the inside, and the
wind is ‘not me’ and ‘not mine’ and takes place on the outside.
The border between the ‘me’ and the ‘not me’ is imagined with the thought that thinks it.
Without this concept there is no ‘me’, no ‘not me’, no inside and no outside. The limited
physical body is simply one more appearance within Awareness.

Is there any experience of a centre or a location from which any experience is known?
Where is the sound of the wind being heard? Where is the sensation of the breath being
felt? Where is the sight of the moon being seen? If the answer is ‘here’ or ‘there’, see
clearly that this so-called location is, in fact, not a location at all. It is simply another
sensation or perception that is experienced in exactly the same ‘place’ as the sound of
the wind, the sensation of the breath or the sight of the moon.
The sound of the wind, the sensation of the breath, the sight of the moon and the apparent
location in which they are supposedly taking place do not in fact take place in any place.
The sound, the sensation, the perception and the apparent location all take place in
placeless Awareness.
Is there an experience of a centre or a location from which or in which our thoughts are
being perceived? Is there any actual experience of a ‘me’, an entity, that is doing the
thinking? Or is thinking just appearing in Awareness like the sound of the wind, the
sensation of the breath and the sight of the moon?
If there seems to be a ‘me’ entity present, a centre of experience, is there a place from
which that experience is being perceived, or is that experience not also simply
appearing in unlocated Awareness? See clearly that thoughts, images, feelings, bodily
sensations, sounds, sights, textures, tastes and smells are all appearing effortlessly in
placeless Awareness.
In order to resist what is present and seek what is not present we must first imagine
ourself to be a separate, limited centre of perception, located in and as the body. We
must first take up a position from which to have a resistance. With this thought alone the
separate, inside self is imagined. The apparently separate self is that imagined position.
However, see if there is, in the seamlessness of experience, a separating line that
divides it into a ‘me’ on one side of the line and a ‘not me’ on the other side.
If we think that we find such a line, is this apparent dividing line not itself simply
another thought, image, sensation or perception appearing in Awareness? And if we do
not find a real dividing line that separates experience into two fields, a ‘me’ field and a
‘not me’ field, then stay with the seamless intimacy of the current experience and see if
it is possible to find a point, a centre, a single location where ‘me’, ‘I’, is located, a
place from which the totality of experience is known or perceived.
See that if we find such a centre or location for our self, the experiencer, this centre is
itself simply a seamless ‘part’ of this current experience. In fact, there are no parts to
experience. Experience is pure, seamless intimacy. See that such a centre is appearing,
like every other thought, image, sensation or perception, in our own intimate,
impersonal, borderless Awareness. See that the ‘me’ is itself an expression of the
seamless totality and that it has no independent reality of its own. It is the shape that this
seamless totality takes from time to time, but it never actually divides anything from
anything.

See whether anything truly changes if we stand up and move around. In fact, there is no
entity that stands up and moves around. No one came into this room and no one sat
down. That is just an interpretation of thought. Awareness is the only substance present
and it never gets up or moves around. There is just sensing and perceiving, and they are
utterly, intimately one with our self, Awareness.
It is thinking alone which abstracts parts, objects, entities, selves and others from the
intimate seamlessness of experience and constructs an image of a person moving around
in space and time, being born, growing old and dying. The person, space, time, birth and
death are for thought, not for experience. In reality there are just new sensations and
perceptions arising in and as placeless Presence.
Even that is not completely true; it is only a thought that says this experience is new.
Experience is too utterly, intimately itself to be able to step back and say such a thing
about itself. Only a thought compares the present with an imaginary past, creating the
old and therefore the new. Every thought image, sensation and perception is fresh and
now. The labels ‘old’ and the ‘past’ are thoughts that appear now. And because there is
no ‘old’ and no ‘past’ there is no ‘new’, no present moment and no future.
Experience itself knows nothing of the past or the future, the old or the new. It knows
only the timeless intimacy of the now. Only an imaginary object could be old or new.
Experience itself is always fresh, intimate, vibrant and alive. It is always now and here,
not ‘now’ in time or ‘here’ in space but rather ever-present and dimensionless.
Experience itself cannot step away from itself as a separate subject in order to know
itself as a separate object. Objects are for thinking, not for our self.
Even to talk of sensations and perceptions is too much. That is just a stepping-stone in
the deconstruction of our experience. In reality, sensations and perceptions are only such
from the point of view of thinking. Thought is only thought from the point of view of
thinking. Experience, that is, our self, knows no such things. Our self is too intimately,
seamlessly one with all experiencing to know itself as ‘something’, such as a mind,
body, other or world. It just knows the intimacy of itself.
This absence of otherness, objectness, selfness is love itself. It is what we are and all
we know.

All such thinking truly dies if we go to the heart of experience. Thinking cannot itself go
to the heart of experience; it can only go to an imaginary past or future. It can never
touch the present. It is always too late.
The separate entity we imagine ourself to be cannot reside in the present. It can only
make its home in the imaginary past or future. It can only reside in time and space, never
in the eternal and infinite Presence of the here and now. It simply dies when it tries to go
there, and that death is love.
The fact that experience may be peaceful or agitated, pleasant or unpleasant, changes
nothing. The particular characteristics of experience do not implicate the seamlessness
of experience. They do not make it more difficult to see that there is no separating line,
nor a perceiving centre, in our experience. Their particular character doesn’t in any way
affect the fact that our experience is always one seamless, intimate totality without
separate parts, objects, entities, selves or others.
In fact, ‘peaceful’ or ‘agitated’, ‘pleasant’ or ‘unpleasant’ are again only interpretations,
superimposed by the mind onto experience itself, which is as it is, neither peaceful nor
agitated. To interpret experience in this way, thinking has to first abstract a separate
entity from the seamlessness of experience and imagine a limited, located point of view
from which experience is evaluated or judged. Experience itself does not know
agitation. Only the mind knows agitation, and the agitation it knows belongs to its own
activity alone.
See clearly that experience is like a seamless piece of cloth with no separate parts,
entities, places, times, objects or selves anywhere to be found – just our self,
Awareness, seemingly taking the shape of this and this and this… and sometimes not
taking any shape at all…colourless, silent, luminous, knowing itself, being itself and
loving itself.
THE IMAGINARY BIRTH OF THE SELF AND THE WORLD

There is no separate entity that experiences and there is no object, person, mind, body,
world or other that is experienced. The mind, the body, the world, people, places,
objects and entities are all abstract conceptions that are superimposed by thinking onto
experience itself. There is only experiencing from moment to moment, and this
experiencing is one ever-present, seamless whole.
From time to time this ever-present, seamless totality, out of its infinite creativity and
freedom, takes the shape of thinking, which goes something like this: ‘I, the seamless
totality, am not the seamless totality. I am this little fragment, this little cluster of bodily
sensations, and everything else that is not this fragment is not me.’
With this thought the apparently separate, inside self and the apparently separate,
outside world, including all ‘others’, are simultaneously born. From this moment
onwards the world becomes the known, the experienced, and ‘I’, which has apparently
contracted into a tiny location somewhere behind the eyes or in the chest area, becomes
the knower, the experiencer, the thinker, the feeler, the chooser, the doer.
The ever-present, seamless intimacy of pure experiencing gives birth to two apparent
things, a subject and an object. Experiencing seems to become the experiencer and the
experienced. However, this separation never actually takes place. It is a virtual birth.
If, as a result of this imaginary separation, objects are considered to be real, aware
Presence will be conceived as their witness. But if we take our stand as this witness
and go deeply into the experience of the apparent object, other or world, we do not find
anything objective there. We find only knowing, only aware Presence. That is, aware
Presence finds or knows itself.
As objects lose their apparent objectness in clear seeing, so aware Presence loses its
apparent witness-ness and stands revealed as pure Awareness alone, pure Presence.
Presence is so utterly and intimately one with every appearance, it says ‘Yes’ so
unreservedly to every experience, that it is also known as love.
Love is the name we give to experience when it is relieved of the conceptual
superimposition of otherness. It knows and loves itself alone. Love is precisely the
experience that there is nobody and nothing else present in experience that could love or
be loved. We never love a person or an object.
Love is the dissolution of the ‘I’ that loves and the ‘other’ that is loved. It is the collapse
of relatedness and the dawn of intimacy. In love, the ‘I’ that I am, the ‘you’ that you are
and the ‘it’ that it is are recognised as modulations of the same being. In love all is
dissolved in that, revealed as that.
This ever-present, seamless totality knows itself, is itself and loves itself
simultaneously in every appearance of the mind, body and world. And when there is no
expression, it simply abides in and as itself, the transparent peace of our true nature.

It is only a thought that apparently divides the seamless totality of experience into an
experiencer and an experienced. There are no personal entities or independent objects
anywhere to be found in actual experience.
‘Me’ and ‘the world’ are co-created in imagination. They always appear together and
disappear together in that which never appears or disappears. They are two sides of the
same coin, and the coin is the forgetting of the seamless intimacy of experience. Its two
faces are ‘me’ and the object or other. However, whatever the appearance of the coin, it
is made only of aware Presence, our self, which is that in which the current experience
appears and also that out of which it is made.
This division of experience into a perceiver and a perceived, a knower and a known, a
lover and a loved, is like a mirage. It never actually happens. Both the experiencer and
the experienced are made of experiencing, and experiencing itself is made out of our
self, aware Presence. In fact, experiencing is not ‘made out of’ aware Presence. It is
that. There is only that.
The idea that there is something other than aware Presence is simply a belief. This
‘something’ that is considered to be other than aware Presence is utterly non-existent. It
is never found in experience. It is found only in imagination. What could or need be
done to something that is non-existent? What could or need be done to that which is
ever-present?
Every part of experience is utterly saturated with this Presence. No part of it is any
closer to or farther away from Presence than any other part. No part of experience is
more or less permeated with this Presence than any other part. In fact, there are no parts
in experience.
‘Presence’, ‘experience’, ‘I’ and ‘love’ are all synonyms for the seamless not-two-ness
of what is.
From time to time thought seems to condense Presence, as it were, into a bodily
sensation and Presence seems, as a result, to become located in time and space.
However, this seeming limitation of Presence is only an idea, a thought. It is imagined.
As a result of this imagining, ‘I, aware Presence’ seems to become ‘me, a body’, and
everything ‘I’ seems not to be becomes ‘you, the other, object or world’. Thus the
apparent self and the apparent world are born of this forgetting.
This birth never actually takes place. There is no ‘me’, ‘you’, other, object or world, as
such. There is only Presence.
WE WERE NOT BORN

Conventional thinking tells us that our self, aware Presence, is born into a ready-made
world that is independent and separate from it. What evidence do we have for this?
What evidence do we have that the Awareness that is seeing these words appears in the
world or that it appears in a mind or a body?
The first experience that we have on waking in the morning appears to our self,
Awareness. Awareness is already present to experience that first experience in the
morning. Likewise, at birth, Awareness is already present to experience whatever our
first experience is.
Have we ever had the experience of Awareness appearing? Of course, we have the
concept that Awareness appears at birth or that it appears first thing in the morning, but
is that an experience?
In order for us to claim legitimately that something appears, Awareness must be present
prior to that appearance. So what about the appearance of Awareness itself? If we claim
that such an appearance actually occurred as an experience, something would have to
have been present to experience that appearance. That ‘something’ would have to have
been present and aware, but that is precisely what Awareness is, that which is present
and aware.
It is impossible to experience the appearance of Awareness. We are that Awareness to
which such an appearance would occur. We have no experience of a beginning to the
Awareness that is seeing these words. We have no experience of its birth. We have no
experience that we, Awareness, are born.
Likewise, in order for us to claim legitimately that Awareness dies, something would
have to be present to experience its disappearance. Have we ever experienced the
disappearance of Awareness? If we think the answer is ‘Yes’, then what is it that is
present and aware to experience the apparent disappearance of Awareness? Whatever
that is must be aware and present. It must be Awareness.
When we are born or when we wake in the morning, we have the experience of the
appearance of objects. When we die and when we fall asleep at night, we have the
experience of the disappearance of objects. We have no experience that we, Awareness,
appear, are born, disappear or die. That is, Awareness has no experience of its own
appearance, beginning, birth, duration, disappearance or death. All such are ideas
superimposed by the mind upon Awareness. However, this superimposition never
actually happens. It is only imagined.
So, our experience is that Awareness is ever-present – that is, Awareness’s own
experience of itself is that it is ever-present – and that the objects of the apparent body,
mind and world come and go within it. Even ‘coming and going’ is a concept. The only
substance present in any experience is Awareness, and Awareness does not come and
go. ‘Coming and going’ is imagined by the mind and superimposed on the ever-presence
of Awareness.
Nothing truly comes and goes. From where would it come and to where would it go?
And what would ‘it’ be? What would it be made out of that is not already present, here,
now, as this Awareness?
Nothing ever comes in or out of existence. Awareness eternally is, and that is the
substance of all seeming things. So in reality there is no waking up in the morning, no
falling asleep, no birth and no death, and no entity who passes through any of these
apparent states. All these times, places, events, entities and occurrences are only
thought, and they all ‘take place’ in the placeless, timeless, dimensionless presence of
Awareness.

All experience is only the ever-present now. Nothing but that is known. So experience
cannot be new because it is never old. It can never even be ‘now’ because it is never
‘then’. The mind simply cannot go to the ‘place’ of experiencing. When this is seen
clearly the mind dissolves, and that dissolution is love.
The appearances of the mind, body and world are made out of perceptions. How long
does a perception last? How long does an image of the world last? How long does a
bodily sensation last? A moment? No! Nothing lasts in time for there is no time present
for anything to last in.
It is Awareness, in which these perceptions appear, that is substantial and ‘lasting’.
Perceptions themselves are fleeting and insubstantial. However, Awareness is not
everlasting in time. It is ever-present, eternally now. Time seems to last in it, but even
that is not true, because there is no duration in Awareness. Time is imagined with the
thought that thinks it, and likewise space.
How could time take place in that which is timeless? How could space exist in that
which is without dimensions? Even the appearance of an apparently solid, durable
object is made only out of fleeting and insubstantial perceptions strung together
conceptually to produce the semblance of a solid, lasting object. There is no ‘lasting’ in
experience. Experience is eternally now.
An object is made out of the same ‘stuff’ that thinking and feeling are made out of. It is
made out of experiencing, and the only substance present in our experience, that is, in its
own experience, is Awareness.
This does not disprove the possibility of the world being made out of something other
than experiencing; it just shows that we have no evidence of such a world. In order to
discover what such a world might be, we first have to divest it of all that is imparted on
it by the mind and the senses.
Divested of all the sense perceptions that the mind imparts on the world, all that
remained of the world would be formless Presence or being. Anything else would be
perceived and therefore would belong to the perceiving faculties rather than to the
world as it truly is. All seeming things, divested of the names and forms that our thinking
and perceiving faculties superimpose onto them, stand revealed as infinite Presence,
that is, pure being without boundaries, borders, limits, location or dimensions. All
seeming things are infinite and eternal.
And is not pure being or Presence, without limit and location, our self? There cannot be
two infinite Presences, because if there were two Presences, each would have to be
limited. If they were limited, they would not be pure Presence, but would rather be an
apparent object. And for whom would that object be? Only for Awareness. Awareness
would be its witness and its substance.
Whichever way we look at it – whether we see the world as simply made of perceiving
or whether we grant the world some reality independent of perceiving – it comes to the
same thing. There is only being, and the aware Presence that we intimately know our
self to be, that knows itself to be, is identical to that.

What evidence is there that the world exists in between two perceptions of it? What
evidence do we have that the world exists when it is not being perceived or that the
body exists when it is not being experienced? Even when the apparent world is being
perceived, even when perceptions are seemingly present, the world does not ‘exist’ as it
is conceived to. That is, it does not ‘stand out’ on its own, independent of
Consciousness. And what if the world were not being perceived? Out of what would it
be made at such a time? In what form would it exist?
Of course, thinking tells us that the world and the body continue to exist when they are
not being experienced, but we have no experience of such a world or body. Indeed, it is
only thinking that tells us that the world and the body exist as such when they are
apparently being perceived or sensed. Experience itself knows no such thing. It is too
intimately itself to be able to step out of itself as a knowing subject and know an object,
other or world. Experience itself knows only pure, seamless, intimate, unnameable
experiencing.
The apparent absence and presence of the world and the body are super-impositions
upon Awareness. The world and the body borrow their seeming substance and
continuity, their seeming reality, from Awareness. It is not our experience that
Awareness is a fleeting, insubstantial appearance within the ever-present reality of the
world. It is our experience that the world is a fleeting, insubstantial appearance ‘within’
the ever-present reality of Awareness.
Even that is not quite true; it is only said in reference to the deep belief in the reality of
objects. There is nothing ‘within’ Awareness. What would such a thing be? Nor is
anything ‘fleeting’. Only thinking knows apparent fleetingness. Experience knows
nothing of time. It is too full of itself alone to know itself as something. It knows only
itself, dimensionless and timeless.
To imagine Awareness as a dimensionless but nevertheless spacelike container is just a
stage to enable us to see that there is no outside, that everything is intimate, close, ‘one
with’. From this point of view experience is conceived of as objects appearing within
Awareness. However, our only knowledge of objects is the experience of sensing and
perceiving, which in turn are made out of Awareness alone. Sensing and perceiving do
not appear in Awareness; they are Awareness. And what is it that knows Awareness?
Only itself. Experience is only Awareness knowing itself.
Even to know experience as ‘sensing and perceiving’ requires an abstraction. It requires
a thought that could separate a knowing subject from the whole and thereby seem to
know an object. Experience itself is far too intimate for that. It knows only its own
seamless intimacy. It knows only love. In other words, experience, love and our self are
one.
Here the idea of Awareness being a vast container of all experience has dissolved in
favour of a more accurate, though not completely accurate, formulation. Nothing appears
‘in’ Awareness. There is only Awareness knowing and being itself eternally.
Again the mind may try to take another step towards the heart of experience, but it finds
that it simply cannot go there. It takes one more step and…effortlessly dissolves.
Right there, experience stands shining as it is.
LOVE IS THE FABRIC OF EXPERIENCE

We all know that ‘I am’, and the ‘I’ that I am is also aware that I am. This aware
Presence that I am knows its own being.
However, Presence doesn’t know its being in an objective way, like the mind seems to
know an object, but rather it is the knowing of itself. It is simultaneously the knowing of
its own being and the presence of knowing or Awareness.
Has Presence ever experienced, or could Presence ever experience, the absence of
itself, the absence of Presence? What would be present to know this absence? Presence
cannot know its own absence, because it would have to be present in that knowing, as
that knowing. Therefore, there is never an experience of the absence of Presence.
Into what could Presence disappear? Into that which is non-existent? How could that
which is disappear into or become that which is not? What would become of its
presence? It would have to ‘go’ somewhere. And from what would Presence appear in
the first place? If Presence were not present, what would there be? Non-existence? But
non-existence cannot be. Therefore, non-existence is non-existent. In fact, non-existence
is only a concept. Only Presence eternally is.
If Presence is ever-present and everything is that Presence, can anything disappear? No
thing ever ceases to be, because no thing ever comes into existence.
The substance or being of every apparent object is only Presence, and Presence
eternally is. There is only one substance – substantial, immutable, unmysterious, never
not known, never not experienced, never not being itself, never not present. It is this one
substance that seemingly takes the shape of all appearances without ever being or
becoming anything other than itself.
However, from the point of view of itself, which is the only real point of view, this
Presence never takes the shape of anything. Water is too close to itself to know itself as
ocean or wave. ‘Ocean’ and ‘wave’ are for thought. For water, there is only water.
Whatever is known is Presence knowing itself. Whatever is, is Presence knowing itself,
being itself and loving itself. Presence cannot cease to know or be itself.
Even in profound ignorance, Presence is knowing and being only itself. That is, it is
loving itself. Therefore, there is no real ignorance. There is no forgetting, no
remembering, no losing or finding. Presence is never bound and never liberated.
Forgetting and remembering, losing and finding, ignorance and liberation are for
thinking, not for Presence.
Presence is never veiled from itself, therefore there is no real unveiling of reality. There
is no self-realisation for Presence, because all that is real in any experience is already
our true self of aware Presence. The unreal is never experienced.
There is no enlightenment for Presence, because our self, aware Presence, is already
and eternally the light of knowing that illumines all seeming things. Anything that may
seem to obscure this light is only made out of the light of knowing. It is that in which,
through which and as which all seeming things are known.
There is no awakening for Presence, because Presence is always already awake in
itself.
There is no death for Presence, for Presence is all there is, and that which is never
ceases to be.
How can this be known if it is not known? By seeing clearly that it is always known. It
can never not be known. That which is not known is not knowable. Such a ‘thing’ is an
idea only. And that which is known is always known.
So any movement or progress is always from knowing to knowing, which is no
movement or progress at all. Movement and progress are for the mind, not for Presence.
Right here, these words and whatever else is being experienced in this moment are
known, but there is no other substance to this experience than its knowing. That is, its
being or its substance is its knowing of itself.
There is no knower of this experience and nothing that is known. There is just the
knowing of it, which is simultaneously identical to being it, and this identity of knowing
and being is known as love.
Love is the fabric of all experience.
EVERYTHING IS FOLDED BACK INTO PRESENCE

This book is about knowing, being and loving what truly is, not what seems to be. An
effort is always needed to love what seems to be, and an effort is always needed not to
love what truly is.
The subtle effort not to love what truly is, is known as the separate self, and that which
is not loved is known as the outside world. The separate self and the outside world, as
they are normally conceived to be, as entities in their own right, are two inseparable
faces of the same unlovingness.
What we call the outside world is simply the absence of love. In love the separate,
outside world, including all apparent others and objects, and the separate, inside self
dissolve, leaving only the seamless intimacy of pure experiencing.
There is no relationship in experience. A relationship would require at least two entities
or objects. In the absence of these apparent entities or objects there is love. Love is the
collapse of all boundaries and separation that seemed to keep entities and objects apart
and related. In other words, the death of the separate self is synonymous with love. This
is why love and death are often closely associated in art and literature.
The separate self and the outside world appear as such when love and understanding are
ignored or seemingly veiled by the arising of dualistic thinking. They are made only of
the apparent forgetting of Presence. However, even this ignoring of love is ultimately an
act of love itself. There is no true forgetting, no true ignorance.
One of the hardest things for the apparently separate self to understand is that there is no
real ignorance. In fact, this cannot be seen by the separate self, because that apparent
self is the very denial of this understanding. Only when the apparently separate self and
the apparently outside world are dissolved in love and understanding does it become
clear that they never existed in their own right to begin with.

It is never possible to love a person or an object. Love is defined precisely by its

unconditional quality. How could an intermittent object be the giver or the receiver of
something that is ever-present?
Love is the name we give to the experience of ‘being one with’ or, more accurately,
simply ‘being one’ or ‘knowing no other’.
Even if we accept provisionally that objects exist in their own right, no two objects can
appear at the same time. The mind may conceptually split experience into a multiplicity
of objects known by a subject, but in reality there is only ever one experience or object
present at a time. Therefore, one object has no relationship with another object. How
can an object have a relationship with a non-existent object?
Every apparent object has a relationship only with the Awareness in which it appears.
Awareness is the knowing element in all experience. And how close is the knowing
element in any experience to the experience itself? Closer than close! They are one and
the same thing. What else is present in experience other than the knowing of it?
When an object is seemingly present it is utterly intimate with, inseparable from and one
with the Awareness that knows it. This inseparable intimacy is known as love. To be an
object, to know an object and to love an object are identical. Therefore, we cannot even
say that an object has a relationship with Awareness. Experience is too intimate to admit
of two entities between which there might be relationship.
Love is the dissolution of the illusion of relatedness.
To know an object (if we provisionally concede that Awareness can ‘know’ an object),
Awareness ‘becomes’ that apparent object, and in ‘becoming’ that seeming object it is
known as love. It is the utter intimacy of giving its entire substance to all appearances.
However, Awareness doesn’t know and love an appearance as something other than
itself. If we go deeply into the experience of whatever is known or loved we find no
substance there other than Awareness itself. Therefore, Awareness doesn’t just know
and love an object; it is that object. Being that apparent object or other is the experience
of knowing and loving.
For anything or anyone to be known or loved, its apparent ‘somethingness’ or
‘someoneness’ must dissolve. At this point it wouldn’t make sense to talk of an object or
other, because objectness and otherness have collapsed into Awareness. With the
dissolution of the apparent object, the witness-like or container-like aspect of
Awareness collapses. We cannot say that Awareness knows, loves or is anything other
than itself. Every experience is simply the experience of Awareness knowing, loving
and being itself.
Love is never a relationship. It is the dissolution of relationship. It is the natural
condition of all experience. If we forget this, the separate self and the outside world
come into apparent existence as entities and objects. As soon as Awareness is
remembered, everything is folded back into it.
Presence reclaims the world, takes it back into itself.
ALL WE EVER LONG FOR

You sometimes describe the end of seeking as the experience of love or happiness, but
calling it that sometimes sets up another seeking pattern, another idea about what
form this moment should take.
Love and happiness seem to come and go like everything else. Thinking that love or
happiness should be present in difficult or unhappy moments just makes me want to
change the current situation and long for something else – in other words, it is just
more seeking.
I write this because the desire to love and be loved has been such a trap for me in the
past. For years I believed it was love I was looking for, and part of me still wants it.
In fact, I’m sitting here crying about this now.
Love, peace and happiness are simply the words that are used to describe the
dissolution of all resistance and seeking, the collapse of separation and otherness, that
is, the taste of our true nature, its taste of itself. They are non-objective in the sense that
they do not have any objective qualities. They are not experiences of the mind or body,
although they impact them.
Seeking and resistance veil our true nature, aware Presence, and thus veil the love,
peace and happiness that are inherent within it, or rather that are it. As a result of
forgetting our true nature of aware Presence and imagining ourself instead to be a
separate, inside self, we set out in the world looking for love in relationships, peace in
situations and happiness in objects.
This seeking is, by definition, uncomfortable – it is the activity of suffering which
defines the separate, inside self. In fact, there is no separate, seeking self; the apparently
separate self is the activity of resisting/seeking.
When the relationship, situation or object is found, the seeking comes temporarily to an
end, and in this dissolution our true nature shines. Aware Presence tastes itself, as it
were, for a brief moment – actually a timeless moment, because the mind is not present
there. That timeless moment is what is known as love, peace or happiness. It is also
known as beauty and understanding. That is our true nature knowing itself as it is, un-
apparently-modified by the sense of an inside self.
When the mind rises up again, it misinterprets this non-objective experience of love,
peace or happiness, during which it was not present, and attributes it to the relationship,
situation or object. With the reappearance of subject–object thinking, love, peace and
happiness are again veiled and thinking sets out again in search of a new relationship,
situation or object, hoping to re-enact the experience of love, peace or happiness that it
mistakenly believes was produced by such before.
It is not the relationship, situation or object that produces the love, peace and happiness.
It is the cessation of the resisting/seeking thought that enables the underlying love, peace
and happiness inherent in our true nature of present Awareness to shine. That is, the
cessation of resisting/seeking allows our true nature to know or taste itself as it is, un-
apparently-veiled by the activity of resisting/seeking. Love, peace and happiness are not
states that come and go, any more than our self, aware Presence, comes and goes,
although they are sometimes seemingly veiled.
If we consider ourself to be a separate, inside self, the search for love, peace and
happiness in the realm of relationships, situations or objects is unavoidable, because the
separate self is the search for love, peace and happiness. However, sooner or later we
have to see that what we long for is not to be found in the realm of objects. It is simply
the knowing of our own being.
Allow your focus on relationships, events and objects to relax. See that your self, your
own being, is present, quietly shining, in the background of all experience. That is peace
itself. That is the abode of love and happiness.
Don’t think of love, peace and happiness as experiences of the body and mind. They are
transparent. Even in the midst of difficult or unpleasant circumstances this aware
Presence that you are is quietly shining in the background. Become acquainted with it. It
is what you most simply and intimately are.
That is all which is ever truly longed for. It is that alone which is sought in all
relationships. That one is free of the sense of distance or otherness, and hence is known
as love; it is imperturbable, and hence is known as peace; it is free of the sense of lack,
and therefore is known as happiness.
But most simply it is known as ‘I’. Be that. Make friends with it. Live with it. Love it.
Rest there.

The love you describe is not love. It is a state of the mind or body, however subtle. True
love does not arise, it does not come and go and it cannot be found in the world. It
cannot be found at one moment and lost at another. It has nothing to do with relationships
or others. In fact, love is precisely the dissolution of all otherness or relatedness.
Every appearance of the mind, body and world is constantly changing. What is it in your
experience that does not change? The one ‘thing’ in your experience that does not change
is you. That is the love you seek.
You will never find it, because you already and always are it, not always in time but
eternally now. Therefore, seeking it is the very denial of its presence. In seeking it, you
compel it to seem as if hidden or lost.
It is your self, aware Presence, that does not change. You are that for which you long,
and your longing is the presence of love itself, thinly veiled by the belief that it is
absent, that it is an object that can be lost and found. The love you seek is present right
here in your longing, but your longing for it as an object in the future, however subtle,
veils its presence in you, as you.
‘Lord, Thou art the love with which I love Thee.’
Let every direction towards which your longing flows dissolve in this understanding,
and the love that is at its heart will remain. Whatever is not present right now is not
worthy of the name ‘love’ and is likewise not worthy of your desire. Forget it. Whatever
is not present now, even if it is one day found, will one day disappear.
Why go for something temporary? It can never fulfil you. Let go of everything that can
be let go of – and anything that appears can be let go of – including all your, my and
everyone else’s ideas about love.
As soon as we look for what is present, it is gone. We cannot focus on or even think
about what is truly present. We can only think about an object, about the past, about the
future. In other words, we can only think of a thought. Thought can never know or find
the one thing that it almost constantly seeks; it can only dissolve in it. Thinking dies as it
turns towards love, like a moth in a flame.
The one thing that is sought in all intimate relationships is this death of the sense of
oneself as a separate entity. The longing for love in intimacy is the longing for this
death, and if one shares this love with an apparent other in an intimate relationship, that
apparent other shines as a beacon of love and light in one’s life. However, that is not
necessary. This light and love are shining in all things.
The true object of all desire is only this death.
Let the mind dissolve in the understanding that it simply cannot go to the place of love
and yet, like a fish in the ocean searching for water, it is already swimming in it.
Let everything pass by. Remember William Blake: ‘He who binds himself to a joy does
the winged life destroy.’ The ‘winged life’ is love itself. It is apparently destroyed by
our looking for it as an object, by ‘binding’ our self to an object, which means to the
past or the future.
Let go, let go, let go. Let your tears be the river into which everything you know is
offered up, all your longing, everything.
Someone once asked Mother Meera if it’s right to offer everything to God or whether
only positive things should be offered, and she replied, ‘A child offers its mother a
snail, a stick or a stone. The mother doesn’t care what is offered; she is just happy to
have been remembered.’
Offer everything. The love you seek is all that will remain behind.
THE MANY NAMES OF GOD

I like the metaphor, in The Transparency of Things, of the paper on which words are
written. When my attention is turned towards the paper on which the words are
written, I become aware of it, whereas I was not before, although the paper was
always there and the words could not exist without it. However, now I see the words
and the paper together. Likewise, the things in the world cannot exist without that
which is the ground of all things.
Yes. In fact, when the paper on which the words are written is pointed out, we become
aware not of the paper but of the fact that we are always aware of the paper. Previously
we thought we were aware of the words alone and unaware of the paper, and now we
see that we are aware of the paper all along.
When we first notice the paper there is a tendency to think that we have suddenly
become aware of the words and the paper. This is true, but only half true!
There are, in fact, no words existing in their own right, independent of the paper,
entitled to their own label ‘words’ as opposed to ‘paper’. There is only the paper,
which takes the shape of or is coloured by the words without ever becoming anything
other than itself. ‘Words’ is just another name for the paper when the paper seems to
have become something other than itself.
Likewise, ‘person’, ‘other’ and ‘world’ are names that thinking gives to Awareness
when it imagines that experience is something other than Awareness. As a result of this
imagining, the person, other or world seems to become an object that is distinct from
Awareness (just as the words are conceived to be distinct from the paper) and
Awareness seems to become a limited, located subject.
Moreover, it seems that the experience of objects precludes the experience of
Awareness, that is, Awareness’s knowing and being itself, just as in seeing the words
we are, to begin with, seemingly unaware of the paper. However, just as an examination
of the words shows that the paper is always seen and that the words are made only of
paper, so a close exploration of the experience of all apparent objects of the mind, body
and world reveals that they are all made only of Awareness.
If all apparent objects of the mind, body and world are made only of Awareness, it no
longer makes sense to speak of objects of the mind, body and world, for there is no
substance there other than Awareness. We no longer start with objects and trace our way
back to Awareness; rather, it is seen that there is, in reality, only Awareness and that
objects, as such, are a partial or distorted view of Awareness.
From the point of view of Awareness, which is the only real point of view (and which
is, of course, not really a point of view) there are no objects. We cannot even say there
is experience, as such, for to do so we must first step back from or out of experience
and look at it from a ‘point of view’. That point of view is the imaginary inside self. In
the absence of this point of view, there is just pure, unnameable, seamless intimacy.
The object, other or world only comes into apparent existence when we take up the
imaginary point of view of the subject. Because the point of view of the subject, the
separate inside self, is an imaginary point of view, the objects that it apparently knows
or sees are equally imaginary.
It is the mind that seems to know objects. Awareness knows only itself.

First we think that there are only objects, that is, only the body, mind and world. Then
we realise there is only our knowing of objects and not the experience of actual objects
themselves. However, if there is only the knowing of objects we cannot say that we
know objects, as such, but rather that we know only knowing. And what is it that knows
knowing? Only knowing! Knowing is only Awareness. Therefore, all that is known is
Awareness knowing itself.
Starting now with Awareness, we can say that all apparent objects of the mind, body
and world are the names and forms that thinking superimposes onto Awareness itself. If
we abide as Awareness, all apparent objects of the mind, body and world dissolve and
are revealed as Awareness alone. But if Awareness seems not to be present – in other
words, if we have, through thinking, seemingly lost ourself in objects – then we may
trace our way back, as it were, to the presence of Awareness.
Seeing oneself as the witness of all apparent objects of the mind, body and world is the
first stage of this tracing back of experience to its source. However, if we truly take our
stand as the witness and contemplate experience from there, the subtle suggestion of a
distinction between the witness and the witnessed is seen to be non-existent and, as a
result, dissolves into pure experiencing. In fact, it does not dissolve into anything; it is
simply seen to be only pure, seamless, ever-present experiencing, whose nature is only
Awareness.
The names we give to the objects of the body, mind and world are, in fact, just other
names for Awareness when it seems to become something other than itself. They are the
many names of God.
These names are not a sign of ignorance; they are only so if they seem to veil Awareness
and the peace and happiness that are inherent in it. Once it is seen clearly that
Awareness is never veiled and that there is nothing other than Awareness, these very
same names are understood and felt to indicate, express and celebrate the very same
Awareness they once seemed to obscure.
Hence our tradition of Christian names, in which the one self is denoted by many names.
My first teacher told a story in which one of his close students named his son Narayan.
He did this because in India Narayan is one of the names of God and every time he
spoke or heard the name of his son he wanted to be reminded of God.
Likewise, whenever we hear our name being called, it is God in us that is being
addressed. When we answer ‘Yes’, it is God in us that is responding, ‘I am here and I
am you!’
IS THE WORLD WITHIN?

What is meant by ‘The world is within’?

The phrase ‘The world is within’ is said to one who believes that the world is outside
of him or herself. In order to believe that the world is outside one must first consider
him or herself to be an individual entity that lives inside the body. So this phrase is used
for the one who believes in duality, that is, in the existence of a separate, inside self –
the subject, ‘I’ – and a separate, outside object, other or world.
If we look towards our self, towards this ‘I’ that knows or experiences the world and is
imagined to be located inside the body, we do not find any objective qualities there.
However, what we find is undoubtedly present and knowing or aware. That is, we find
aware Presence or Awareness.
And what is it that finds or recognises this Awareness? Whatever it is, is both aware
and present. This Awareness knows itself.
Having seen clearly that Awareness cannot be found as an object, we realise that it
cannot be located either in or as the body, for only something with objective qualities
could be located inside another object, as a table is located, relatively speaking, inside
a room. Likewise, something that has no objective qualities cannot be limited, for a
limit is, by definition, an objective quality.
So instead of thinking, ‘I, the body/mind, experience the world’, we realise that ‘I, this
unlocated, unlimited presence of Awareness, experience the body/mind/world’.
Now, if we look closely at the experience of the body/mind/world we find that it is
made only of sensations, thoughts and perceptions, and that all sensations, thoughts and
perceptions are inseparable from Awareness. We have already seen from our own
intimate, direct experience that there is no boundary to Awareness and we therefore
have no experience of anything outside it.
At this point it becomes clear that our only experience of the world, that is, the current
perception, appears within Awareness, and hence the saying, ‘The world is within’. At
this stage the phrase is true and replaces the less true belief that the world is outside.
However, although it is true in relation to the previous position, it too is found, on
looking more deeply at our experience, to be untrue. Although the world may be felt to
appear within us, there is still a distinction between the world made of perceptions and
the Awareness in which it appears. There is still a subtle duality.
If we go deeply into the actual experience of these perceptions, we find no substance
there other than perceiving, and if we go deeply into perceiving we find only Awareness
itself. That is, it finds or knows only itself. At this stage the phrase ‘The world is
within’ is seen to be untrue and may be abandoned.

It now becomes clear that it was a mistake to start with the world and to think of it
arising within Awareness. We only started there because we wanted to engage the initial
presumption that the world is outside on its own terms. In reality, there is nothing in the
experience of the world other than Awareness itself, and there is no inside or outside of
Awareness. Nothing arises inside or outside Awareness, nor is there anything present in
Awareness other than itself that could rise up within it.
So we start with Awareness, which is our primary and, in reality, our only experience.
We see that it is this Awareness that takes the shape of perceiving and, as a result, seems
to become a world but never actually becomes anything other than itself, just as a
computer screen seems to take the shape of numerous documents and images but in
reality always simply remains the screen.
And what is it that experiences Awareness seemingly taking the shape of all experience?
Only Awareness! It is Awareness that is always only ever knowing and being itself, and
all seeming objects, others and the world are simply modulations of this knowing
Presence.
At this stage, having previously seen that the world is not experienced outside ourself, it
is similarly understood that the world is not experienced inside ourself either, but rather
that there is just Awareness knowing and being itself, with no inside, outside, object,
world, other or self ever actually found or experienced as such.
There is just Awareness knowing and being itself, seamlessly and intimately one with
all experience. And because there is no possibility of any two-ness or not-Awareness-
ness, there is no possibility of the presence of an entity or self to feel a sense lack, need,
separation or otherness. For this reason, experience is not just Awareness knowing and
being itself but also loving itself. That is, experience knows only complete intimacy,
not-otherness.
All the apparent objects of the mind, body and world are made out of the intimacy of
Awareness, out of love.
It is for this reason that William Blake said, ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of
time.’
Even to say that experience is only Awareness knowing, being and loving itself is not
quite accurate. As the mind searches for a word or a phrase that would adequately
express the nature of experience, it dissolves in the impossibility of the task. It is like a
candle that naturally burns itself out.
THE SHADOW OF THE SEPARATE SELF

I understand in theory that I am Consciousness, but in my actual experience I feel

that what I am is specifically connected to this body. I feel that I am limited, located
and separate.
The ‘I am only the body’ feeling is the root cause of all suffering. This feeling thrives on
inadvertence. It cannot stand being clearly seen. It is like a shadow that vanishes when a
light is shone on it. In this case clear seeing is the light.
First, see clearly that you are the aware Presence in which these words and whatever
else is being experienced in this moment are appearing. Now see clearly that all we
know of the body is a sensation or cluster of sensations and, if our eyes are open, a
visual perception appearing in this Presence.
At least for the time being, separate this Presence from the sensation. See clearly that
sensations flow through Presence in the same way that the sound of the car that just went
by flowed through it. In both cases Presence remains intact, unchanged in any way by the
appearance and disappearance of the sensation or perception that appeared in it.
Presence is therefore entirely independent of the sensations and perceptions that appear
in it, although the sensations and perceptions are entirely dependent on it. However,
after the sensation of the body and the perception of the sound, a thought appears that
says, ‘I, this Presence, am the sensation of the body but am not the perception of the
sound.’
This is not in fact true of our experience, because the sensation to which the thought
refers has already vanished and yet Presence is still present to witness the thought. The
thought identifies Presence with something that is no longer present, that is, with a
fleeting sensation. How can Presence be a sensation if it remains after the
disappearance of the very sensation with which it was supposedly identified?
The belief in being a separate entity that is exclusively associated with the body is
created as an afterthought, that is, after the fact of sensing or perceiving. It is not present
during the sensing and perceiving itself.
It is thought alone that collates one series of sensations and perceptions – the body –
and identifies them exclusively with our self, aware Presence, thereby creating an
apparent ‘me’, and that collates another series of perceptions and out of them imagines
an apparent object, other or outside world.
It is with this thought alone that an imaginary line is drawn through the seamless
intimacy of experience, thereby dividing one part of it from another – ‘me’, the body,
and ‘not me’, the object, other or world.

We normally think that the skin is the container of all bodily sensations. However,
bodily sensations are not housed within the contour of the skin. The skin is, in fact,
simply another sensation, and one sensation does not appear within another sensation.
All sensations appear in our self, aware Presence.
We normally consider that I am the envelope in which all bodily sensations are housed.
However, this ‘me’ is an imaginary contour, made out of thought, which is drawn around
a cluster of sensations. Everything inside this imaginary contour is considered to be
‘me’ and everything outside it becomes ‘not me’, which is simply another name for
objects, others and the world.
How can I be this contour, this thought? I am not a thought or a sensation. I am that to
which or in which thoughts and sensations appear.
The separate, inside self and the separate, outside object, other or world are two sides
of the same coin. The coin is ignorance – the ignoring of the true nature of experience. It
is with this thought alone that our self, aware Presence, is apparently identified with and
limited to a cluster of sensations.
Presence appears, as a result, to assume the qualities of the body – to become limited,
located and separate. In this way the separate ‘me’ is seemingly born. However, this
contour is non-existent as an actual experience. It is made only out of thought.
Try to find this contour as an actual experience. Where is the line in our actual
experience between this bodily sensation and that perception of the world? Is it made
out of anything other than the thought that thinks it? And even if we do find something
that seems to be a good candidate for such a dividing line, is it not itself simply another
appearance within Presence?
Once this investigation of experience has been carried out, the belief that we are a body
is irreparably damaged, if not immediately destroyed. However, the feeling of being a
body is more pernicious and lingers in spite of our understanding to the contrary. If we
keep returning to this exploration of our actual experience, it becomes more and more
obvious that we are aware Presence itself, and that this Presence is not identified with a
body and has no inherent limitation or location.
Nothing else remains to be done once the exploration has brought about this
understanding. We simply remain as this aware Presence, and the mind, body and world
are gradually and effortlessly realigned with it, although we may cooperate with this
realignment. In fact, we have always only been this aware Presence, even when we
believed and felt ourself to be otherwise. Now we abide there knowingly.
If it seems that this is forgotten, we just return to the exploration and re-establish the
truth of the matter for ourself, in our own experiential understanding. This naturally and
spontaneously returns us to abiding knowingly as Presence.
As time goes on, deeper and deeper layers of experience are subjected to and colonised
by this experiential understanding and become, as it were, permeated and saturated by
the peace, happiness and love that are inherent in Presence. All experience is always
only permeated and saturated with Presence whether we know it or not. Now it is
known and felt as such.
THE AMNESS OF SELF IS THE ISNESS OF THINGS

The sensation of the wind on our face is one single sensation. However, thinking
conceptualises it as two. Thinking fragments this single sensation into two apparent
objects, the wind and the face. In fact, it is one. We could call this new sensation
‘windface’.
The conceptual separation of ‘windface’ into wind and face seemingly divides
experience into a face, ‘me’, and the wind, ‘not me’. As a result the ‘person’ and the
‘world’ seem to become two distinct and independent entities or objects. The seamless
intimacy of experience is apparently fragmented into an inside self and an outside
object, other or world, which are imagined to be joined together by an act of feeling,
perceiving or knowing.
Hence we say, ‘I know such and such’, ‘I feel the wind’, ‘I love you’ and ‘I see the tree’.
However, in the seeing of a tree, for instance, there is no seer and there is no seen.
There is no inside ‘I’ that sees and no outside ‘tree’ that is seen. The ‘I’ and the ‘tree’ are
concepts superimposed by thinking onto the reality of the experience, which in this case
could simply be called ‘seeing’.
It is thinking alone that divides the seamless intimacy of experiencing into a subject and
an object, into an ‘I’ that sees and a ‘tree’ that is seen. Awareness, or ‘I’, and the reality
of the tree are not two separate experiences. They are one.
‘I’ and ‘tree’ are one experience in the same way that the wind and the face are one
experience. There is never a subject or an object of experience. There is always only
seamless, intimate experiencing. Or we could say that the apparent ‘I’ and the apparent
tree share the same reality, are the same reality. It is only a concept, an idea, which
apparently divides them.
The division between the seer and the seen, between the experiencer and the
experienced, never actually happens. Separation is an illusion; it is never actually
experienced.
I don’t see a tree. In the experience of seeing, I am the tree. I am its reality. The only
substance present in our experience of the tree is seeing, and seeing – or, more
generally, experiencing – is Awareness, our self. The Awareness that is seeing and the
reality of that which is seen are not two separate things. They are one and the same.
We should say, ‘I am tree-ing’ – that is, ‘I, Awareness, am tree-ing’. The amness of ‘I’
and the isness of ‘tree’ share their being. The amness of self is the isness of things. The
apparent mind, body and world is ‘I, mind/body/world-ing’.
All the great religions are founded upon this realisation. For instance, in Christianity the
saying, ‘I and my father are one’ means precisely this. It means that ‘I’, the Awareness
that is seeing these words or experiencing whatever is being experienced in this
moment, is one with whatever is being experienced. That is, it is one with the reality of
the universe.
The Sufis say, ‘There is only God’s face.’ The Hindus say, ‘Atman (the apparently
individual self) and Brahman (the ultimate reality of the universe) are one. The
Buddhists say, ‘Nirvana (the emptiness of Awareness) and samsara (the fullness of
experience) are one.’

This is not an extraordinary experience known only by a few enlightened sages. It is the
direct, intimate, immediate experience of each of us, although it may not have been
noticed.
The knowing of this unity between ‘I’ and the world is a very familiar experience. It is
known as beauty. When we are struck by the beauty of an object or landscape, all that
keeps us at a distance or separate from that object dissolves, and in that timeless
moment – timeless because the mind is not present there – we realise our identity with
the apparent object. The experience of beauty is the dissolution of the apparent
‘objectness’ of the object and ‘subjectness’ of our self, leaving only the seamless
intimacy of experiencing.
Of course, when the mind returns it recreates the separate, inside self and the separate,
outside object, other or world, and we think and feel as a result that ‘I see the
landscape’. Thinking now attributes beauty to the landscape, and in that moment beauty
is downgraded from a revelation of the eternal nature that pervades all seeming things to
a relative quality that belongs to some objects and not others. In that moment, time and
distance – or otherness, which is another name for space – are created and the true
experience of beauty is again veiled.
When the dissolution of separation between ‘I’ and an apparent other is known, the very
same experience is known as love. Happiness, peace, humour and intelligence are all
names that are given to this direct recognition of the seamless intimacy of experience. In
fact, all the names of the mind, body and world refer ultimately to this one reality.
It is for this reason that love, happiness and peace are said to be unconditional,
absolute. They depend on nothing. They are interwoven into the fabric of all experience.
Once the ‘I’ and the object, other or world have been conceptually separated from the
seamless intimacy of experience, the love, happiness, peace and beauty that are inherent
in all experience seem to become veiled and, as a result, the seemingly inside self
embarks on a search for them in the apparently outside world.
The resolution of the search, which is known as peace, happiness or love, always
involves the recognition that experience is not divided into two parts – ‘I’ and ‘other’,
‘me’ and the ‘world’ – whether or not it is actually formulated in these terms. Likewise,
suffering always involves the forgetting or ignoring of this simple, primordial fact of
experience.
Happiness is simply the unveiling of this ignorance. It is not a new experience. It does
not come and go. It cannot be given or withdrawn. It can only appear to be forgotten and
remembered or recognised. It is like the keys under the papers. They seemed to be lost
but are, in fact, always there.
In the experience of peace and happiness, the inside self and the outside world dissolve.
In the experience of love, the one who loves and the one who is loved dissolve.
Because our only experience of the world and all others is made only of knowing, we
could say that in the experience of peace and happiness, the apparent otherness or
‘outsideness’ of the world is dissolved in our experiential understanding that there is
always only knowingness or Awareness. That is peace, happiness, love and beauty.
It is only to the mind that peace, happiness and love seem to be lost and seem to be
found. Presence never loses itself.
REALITY IS NOT MYSTERIOUS

It seems that reality is completely mysterious, beyond the grasp of the mind. Is there
anything the mind can do to approach it?
The fact that the mind is asking this question already betrays a belief in the mind’s
ability to do something to approach the truth. So, if the response were that there is
nothing to be done, this would only add a layer of belief that there is nothing to do on
top of the deeper feeling that there is something to do.
However, the problem lies in the first statement, that reality is mysterious. Reality is not
mysterious. It is present, here, shining in this current experience. It is substantial,
intimate and immediate.
Implicit in the idea that reality is mysterious is that it is somehow not being experienced
now. It is considered that what is being experienced now are words, chairs, walls,
fields, trees, sky, bodies, thoughts and so on, and that reality is concealed behind this
current experience and is veiled by it.
It is considered that the mind cannot know reality but that it can know things. It is
considered that chairs, walls, fields, trees and sky are known by the mind but that reality
is beyond that and unknown. However, the mind knows nothing. It is known. Words,
chairs, walls, fields, trees and sky are not known by the mind. Our only knowledge of
them is the mind.
The mind in the broadest sense is simply this current thought, image, sensation or
perception. It is the mind itself that postulates something called a ‘tree’ that exists
independently and is perceived by the mind. However, we have no experience of a tree
outside the mind. In fact, we don’t even have the experience of a tree within mind.
The so-called tree is just one brush stroke on the canvas, the total field of seemingly
objective perceptions. We never experience the brush stroke by itself. There is only the
totality of the canvas from moment to moment, with no separate parts. The concept of an
individual tree is, of course, experienced, but that to which the concept refers, the ‘tree’,
is never experienced as such. This does not invalidate the concept of a tree, but it does
invalidate the belief that there is something in our actual experience that corresponds to
the concept.
In this way we come to see clearly that the ‘tree’ is simply the concept of the tree. The
concept of a tree is an abstraction, an idea that is supposed to correspond to a part of the
current objective experience, a visual perception. Even the perception of the tree is
never experienced as such; there are always other elements in the field of vision. And
even to say there are other elements is an abstraction; there are no elements, no parts to
the current experience. There is only the seamless totality from moment to moment.
If we allow this totality to present itself just as it is, we find that it is not made of
separate thoughts, sensations and perceptions. It is one seamless experience of
thought/sensation/perception. And if we look closely at our experience we see that this
kaleidoscopic object is, in fact, no object at all. It is only made of
thinking/sensing/perceiving. If we look closely again and ask ourself what is the
relationship of thinking/sensing/perceiving to our self, the aware Presence that illumines
and knows it, we find that there is no part of the experience that is not saturated and
permeated with our self.
Even that is not quite right, for there is no part, no thing, to be saturated or permeated. It
is not like a sponge saturated with water; that is just a manner of speaking. Rather, there
is only this aware Presence taking the shape of experiencing – that is, taking the shape of
thinking/sensing/perceiving – seemingly metamorphosing into a body, a mind and a
world, without ever being or becoming anything other than itself.
And even that is not quite right. Our self, Awareness, does not take any shapes. It is
always only itself. All these different statements are attempts to break out from the
straightjacket in which thinking has imprisoned experience so as to reveal the reality of
experience in an experiential way. Each statement is, in a sense, more refined or closer
to a true expression of reality than the one it replaces, but ultimately none are true. They
are all simply evocations of reality.

All that is ever experienced is Awareness. And it is Awareness that is experiencing

Awareness.
There is nothing mysterious about that. The mystery is always for thought, never for our
self. It is thought that has postulated the separate existence of objects, made out of
something other than our self, called matter. This thought veils the true nature of
experience and makes it seem to be mysterious and not known. For our self, aware
Presence, there is no mystery. Reality is all that is ever known.
Reality is staring itself in the face. It is waving in the tree-tops, singing in the birds,
glowing in the sky, babbling in our thoughts, rumbling in the traffic, crying in the child. It
is calling out to itself in every minute nuance of every experience, ‘My love, my love,
my love!’
So, in reality, it is the trees, sky, thoughts, traffic and so on that are mysterious – so
mysterious that no one has ever seen, heard, touched, tasted or smelt them, as such. The
objects of the body, mind and world are so mysterious that they are nowhere to be
found.
Reality is the only thing that is not mysterious. It is so well and intimately known! And
because reality, Awareness, Presence, our own being, is all there is, nothing is
mysterious. This of course does not mean that it can be known or framed by the mind.
For the mind that believes its own abstract conceptions of reality to be true, that
believes in the reality of cars, people, houses, chairs and so on, reality itself seems
abstract, conceptual and mysterious.
What is real for Awareness is abstract and utterly mysterious for the mind, and what is
seemingly real for the mind is utterly non-existent for Awareness. The mind’s point of
view is only legitimate from its own point of view. It is simply the arrogance of thought
that considers reality to be mysterious. It is the mind saying, ‘I know things but I do not
know reality’, when the mind itself knows nothing; it is known.
In the knowing of whatever is known, Awareness is knowing itself, being itself and
loving itself, simultaneously. There is only reality, knowing, being and loving itself
eternally.
Nothing else truly is.
AWARENESS ALWAYS KNOWS ITSELF

Is it true that we cannot be aware of Awareness?

It depends on what is meant by ‘we’. If by ‘we’ is meant the mind or the person, the
answer is ‘No, we cannot be aware of Awareness.’ However, the mind and the person
are not entities that can be aware of anything.
Whatever it is that is aware of anything, such as a mind or a person, is what is referred
to by the word ‘Awareness’. It is obviously Awareness that is aware. So the question
could be rephrased, ‘Is it true that Awareness is not aware of itself?’
The suggestion that Awareness is not aware of itself is an expression of fundamental
ignorance. Inherent in the statement is an acknowledgement of the presence of
Awareness but also the suggestion that it is not experienced or known, that is, not
experiencing or knowing itself. If Awareness is not experienced, how can we claim that
it is present? We cannot legitimately assert the presence of something that is not
experienced. What knowledge of its presence would we have outside our experience of
it?
The claim that Awareness is present comes from direct experience. Simply ask yourself
the question, ‘Am I aware?’ The answer ‘Yes’ comes from the experience of Awareness
knowing itself.
If this were not the case we would be able to deny its presence. Ask yourself the
question, ‘Can I legitimately deny the presence of Awareness in this moment? Can I
deny my own being?’ No! Awareness is required to hear the very question about its own
presence. I can never experience my own non-existence. In other words, non-existence
is always a concept, never an experience.
However, let us assume for the time being that, as the question suggests, Awareness is
not aware of itself. There is obviously some experience taking place in this moment, for
instance the sight of these words and whatever other thoughts, images, sensations and
perceptions are being perceived. There is something that is being experienced,
whatever the particular character of that ‘something’ is. We do not need to know what
that something is – in fact, we don’t know what anything truly is – but we know that
there is experience.
Now, if we claim that we are not experiencing Awareness, that is, that we are not
experiencing or knowing our own being, but that we are experiencing something – these
words, for instance – then, by definition, these words cannot themselves be Awareness,
which we claim is not being experienced.
So in effect we are claiming that Awareness is present but is not being experienced, and
that these words are also present and that they are being experienced. We are saying that
in this current experience there are two things, Awareness and these words. But is this
current experience one or two experiences? Experience and Awareness are one.
When the witnessed object is thus seen to be no object at all, its apparent reality
vanishes, leaving Awareness, its real reality, the witness, alone. However, the witness
cannot stand alone; by definition, it requires the witnessed. So, with this experiential
understanding, the subtle superimposition of ‘witnessing’ onto Awareness dissolves, and
Awareness is left all alone, as it eternally is.
It is for this reason that it is sometimes said that Awareness is the witness and substance
of all seeming things. If we still believe in the apparent reality of things, Awareness is
conceived as their witness. When the apparent reality of things collapses, witnessing
collapses with it and only substance is left. However, it is not the substance of
something; it is just substance, just reality.

Each time we explore our experience in this way, we are, whether we realise it or not,
clearing part of the jungle of dualistic thinking. Our old beliefs cannot stand the light of
this understanding. They simply collapse as a result of being clearly seen for what they
are, that is, to have no experiential basis.
With the collapse of these beliefs comes the exposure of all the feelings that relied on
them for their existence. There is no experiential or conceptual support for these
feelings anymore. The beliefs upon which they have fed for so long have dissolved, and
as a result the feelings too dissolve, in time. They die of exposure to the light of
understanding.
This has a profound effect on the quality of the appearances. The filter of dualistic
thinking and feeling which we superimposed onto sensations and perceptions, that is,
onto the body and world, is withdrawn. As a result the body and world, which in fact
have always only ever been what they truly are, are now felt as such.
Just as our previous experience of the world perfectly conformed to the beliefs and
feelings that we entertained about it, simply because it was, as it were, projected
through them, so our new experience perfectly reflects this new experiential
understanding. The world becomes friendly, intimate, vibrant, loving. As the
realignment of thoughts, feelings and perceptions with our experiential understanding
continues and deepens, the world becomes more and more transparent.
It is not that we do not experience Awareness. It is rather that we – that is, Awareness
itself – only experience Awareness. It experiences nothing other than itself.
In fact, it would be more accurate to say that we do not experience an object, world,
body or mind, as such. Experience is always only this present Awareness. Its ever-
present knowing of itself, in and as the seamless intimacy of this and all experience, is
its loving itself.
If we look deeply into our experience we find that, far from Awareness being unknown
and objects being known, it is Awareness that is all that is ever known. That which we
previously considered to be known, that is, the world, others and objects, are in fact
never known, as they are normally conceived.
That which knows is Awareness, and all it ever knows is itself. It is not possible for
Awareness to know or experience anything other than itself.
Awareness not only knows itself, but always and only knows itself, throughout and in
between the three states of waking, dreaming and sleeping. In fact, waking, dreaming
and sleeping are just modulations of one substance, like an eddy or a current within the
ocean of Awareness.

It is sometimes said that the experience of Awareness knowing itself is a non-objective

experience, but this is a half-truth spoken to those who deeply believe in the real
existence of objects. To say that Awareness is non-objective suggests that there is
something else that is objective. It is to suggest that objects are real in themselves.
However, there are no objects as such, and no subject. There is no subjective
experiencer and there is no object that is experienced. There is only experiencing from
moment to moment, and the substance of this experiencing is only Awareness.
The mind, body and world are projected within Awareness and made only out of
Awareness, and yet they are projected in such a way as to seem to be both separate from
and made out of something other than Awareness.
Not only does Awareness create whatever it imagines. It also has a veiling power by
which the true nature of its creation is concealed and projected so that it seems to be
other than itself. The tool through which it seemingly creates and veils is what we call
‘mind’. However, the mind is only a mind from the illusory point of view of a mind.
There is no such thing in reality.
This veiling power is sometimes called ignorance, because it is the apparent ignoring of
Awareness. Awareness, as it were, veils, ignores or forgets itself by taking the shape of
the thought that imagines it is absent. However, even this shape is only an expression of
Awareness knowing and being itself. Awareness is never truly veiled, and therefore
there is no true ignorance, although the illusion of ignorance is very powerful.
It is this veiling, ignoring or forgetting which allows the mind, body and world to
appear as outside, separate and other, that is, as real in their own right, independent of
Awareness. In this way they seem to appropriate the reality that properly belongs to
Awareness alone. ‘Mind’, ‘body’ and ‘world’ are simply the names the mind gives to
Awareness when it seems not to be known.
This veiling, ignoring or forgetting is synonymous with the apparent birth of the separate
self and separate world. It is also known as suffering or unhappiness. It is the veiling of
the happiness which is inherent in the simple knowing of our own being. However, just
as our self, Awareness, has this veiling, ignoring or forgetting power, it also has a
revealing or remembering power, with which it comes to know again, to recognise or
remember its own nature.
From the point of view of thinking, Awareness is sometimes known and sometimes
unknown. However, it is not that at one time Awareness is veiled by objects and at
another time it knows itself. From the point of view of Awareness, which is the only
real point of view, Awareness is always knowing itself – it is the ever-present knowing
of itself. The apparent forgetting or unknowing of Awareness is for the mind, not for
Awareness.
In the presence of apparent objects Awareness knows itself as each of these apparent
objects. That is, it knows itself taking the shape of experience from moment to moment.
However, in doing so it never knows anything other than itself. It only knows ‘something
other’ from the point of view of thinking.
When each of these apparent objects disappears, it disappears or merges into
Awareness. In fact, it was never anything other than Awareness in the first place. At this
point Awareness simply continues to know itself as it always does. This is known as the
experience of love, peace, happiness, beauty or understanding. These are some of the
many names given to Awareness when it knows itself unmediated through the apparent
veil of objectivity.
Experience is one ever-present, homogeneous, substantial, self-knowing, self-luminous,
self-loving Presence. It always only ever is itself, and always only ever knows itself.
THERE IS NO REAL IGNORANCE

What is the cause of ignorance?

In this question there is a presumption, as in all questions about cause, that there are at
least two things, one, a cause, and two, its effect, ignorance. Duality – and the diversity
and multiplicity that are implicit in it – is inherent in the question about cause, in the
question, ‘Why?’
Duality exists only as an idea in the mind. It has no real existence outside the thought
that thinks it. The belief that duality is real is what is referred to as ignorance, the
ignoring or apparent veiling of the true nature of reality. Therefore, the question as to the
cause of ignorance presumes the very ignorance about which it asks and which is found,
upon investigation, to be non-existent.
So, to the question, ‘What is the cause of ignorance?’ we can only answer, ‘The very
question about ignorance itself.’ Ignorance is created and given seeming existence with
the thought that thinks it. It has no other cause.
However, all thoughts are known. All that is known is knowledge. Knowledge is made
of knowing. And knowing is made of our self, aware Presence. Therefore, even the
thought about ignorance is made only of our self, aware Presence, and is not really
ignorance at all. So we cannot even say that ignorance is created by the thought that
thinks it, because the ignorance that is referred to is at all times utterly non-existent.
Even if we provisionally accept that ignorance is real, it is still not possible to find a
cause for it. In such a case, the cause for ignorance cannot be ignorance itself, because
ignorance is the effect for which we are seeking a cause. Therefore, the cause for
ignorance must be free of ignorance, that is, true knowledge.
However, in the apparent ignorance for which we are seeking a cause, true knowledge
cannot be present, because ignorance is defined as the lack of true knowledge. How
could true knowledge give rise to something that is not itself, not made out of itself? An
effect must contain the cause within it, as bread contains flour. How, therefore, could
reality give rise to unreality?
At the absolute level there is only aware Presence, and the nature of aware Presence is
to be and to be aware. Aware Presence cannot ‘not be’ and it cannot ‘not be aware’.
Awareness and being are ever-present. All there is, is aware Presence, and it is itself
and is aware of itself eternally. Awareness cannot be ignorant of itself.
Therefore, ignorance at this level is also a concept. It is equivalent to saying, while
watching a film, that the screen is not present and, as a result, asking, ‘What is the cause
of the absence of the screen?’ Even if the image is one of blackness, nothingness, it is
still made of the screen. Therefore, ignorance is never an experience. It is simply an
idea.
It is for this reason that Advaita does not really answer the ‘Why?’ question. It is not an
avoidance of the issue. It is the dissolution of the issue in understanding.
All answers about the cause of ignorance that acknowledge the existence of ignorance
may pacify the mind temporarily, but they do not take us beyond the mind. Such
provisional answers generate beliefs, and these beliefs in time turn into a religion, in
this case an Advaita religion.
However, understanding destroys these false beliefs once and for all, and with their
destruction the mind’s armoury is slowly dismantled until all that is left is open
unknowing. When we know that it is not possible to know anything objective with
absolute certainty, we cease to look for knowledge in the wrong place. As a result, the
only thing that is truly known shines in all experience.
NOTHING EVER DISAPPEARS

Nothing ever disappears. How could something that is become ‘is not’? How could
existence become non-existence? Where would the substance of existence go if it were
to disappear? Where would its isness, its being, its presence, go? Into what would it
vanish? What is it that disappears when an image on the screen disappears? The
substance of the image is the screen, and the screen does not disappear. It simply takes
the shape of the next image.
This may seem hard to understand, because we believe that when a so-called object is
present, it is present as an independent object. We think that the memory of an apple is
imaginary but that when the actual apple is present, it is real as an object.
It is true that the memory of the apple is only an image in the mind. However, we fail to
notice that when we see the actual apple it is also only an image. All we know of the
apple, in that case, is seeing. And when we touch the apple, we only know touching;
when we smell it we only know smelling; when we taste it we only know tasting. We
never experience the actual apple as it is conceived, that is, as an object in its own right
with its own independent and separate existence.
There is no difference in our actual experience between the substance of the apple that
appears in memory and the substance of the actual apple that appears in ‘real time’. Our
only knowledge of both is made out of mind – out of seeing, touching, smelling and
tasting – and the substance of mind is only Awareness.
That which is truly present as the so-called apple is, in fact, only Awareness itself.
There is no substance in experience other than Awareness, and that never disappears.
That is our ever-present experience whether we realise it or not.
How could Awareness experience its own absence or disappearance? It is our own
direct, intimate, immediate experience that this ever-present always-here-ness that we
are is the sole substance of all experience. The apple, the object and indeed the world,
as such, are simply the apparent forgetting of this simple fact of experience. However,
this forgetting takes place in the mind alone. Presence never truly forgets itself.
If we take our stand in the mind, then the peace and happiness that are inherent in our
self, aware Presence, seem to be obscured. Who is the one that takes its stand in the
mind? The mind! Only thinking imagines that imaginary one! The imaginary inside self
is only real from its own imaginary point of view.
Presence is only seemingly veiled by this imagining; it is never actually veiled. It is the
ever-present knowing of itself alone.
PURE, UNCLOUDED AWARENESS

Our nature is pure, unclouded Awareness. Love is not a definable thing. It is beyond
the realm of our habitual thoughts-feelings-actions. However, our thoughts-feelings-
actions originate within this Awareness. How would you define in a quick, simple
statement the core essence of this teaching and the way to get there?
The essence of this teaching is precisely the pure, unclouded Awareness that you cite.
Without a question, there is no teaching. There is only this pure, unclouded Awareness,
knowing-being-loving itself. It is not known by someone.
A question is like a bucket that is dipped into this ocean of pure, unclouded Awareness.
What comes out is intimately and uniquely fit to the shape of the bucket. When the
answer is heard it resonates with the same pure, unclouded Awareness in the apparent
hearer. That is, aware Presence recognises itself.
At this stage the bucket dissolves and only pure, unclouded Awareness remains. There
is no teacher who answers and no student who hears. Nor is there any formulated
teaching or fixed point of view or attitude from which the responses come.
It is precisely because the water is fluid and transparent and has no form or colour of its
own that it is able to flow into each bucket and take up its unique shape. This is how the
teaching works at the level of words: pure silence ‘flows’ into the question,
acclimatises itself to it and finally dissolves the question into itself.
The teaching is not the words that are framed in response to a question. The words are
just the packaging. The teaching is that from which the words come. The only reason
pure, unclouded Awareness takes the form of a response in words is to dance with the
form that it took in the question.
A true question that arises in the heart compels this pure, unclouded Awareness to
appear in a form that will correspond with it. That is why a sincere desire for a friend
or a teacher will always compel this pure, unclouded Awareness to appear in human
form. Pure, unclouded Awareness is simply responding to its own desire, and in this
sense the human teacher is a devotee of pure, unclouded Awareness every bit as much as
the student is.
The dance that ensues may be long or short, but in the end both the thoughts that make up
the question and the thoughts that make up the response dissolve in the true answer,
which is their source and substance. In this dissolution the teacher and the student lose
their apparent separateness and find themselves as one in love or friendship.
What is the way to get there? Stand up and try to take a step towards yourself. In which
direction do you turn? Try to take a step away from yourself. In which direction do you
go?
The standing up, the trying to take a step, the search for a direction, the realisation that
there is none, the encounter with a teaching or teacher, and the silence that remains are
all part of ‘the way to get there’.
When the ‘there’ dissolves, the ‘here’ is revealed. When the ‘here’ dissolves, our self,
aware Presence, stands alone.
THE BURNT ROPE

I have heard it said that there is sometimes an initial awakening followed by a

process of stabilisation. What is this referring to?
There is no personal, separate entity anywhere in the universe at any time, so there is no
question of a separate person awakening, and even less of this imaginary ‘me’ becoming
stabilised in this realisation. Awareness is always only knowing itself.
However, there is a timeless moment when Awareness recognises itself knowingly, and
there is a subsequent process in time whereby the old patterns of thinking and feeling
are gradually realigned with this self-recognition.
There is a moment when it becomes obvious that we are this presence of Awareness and
that this Presence is without limitation, was not born, cannot die and never moves,
changes or is affected by any appearance, irrespective of the character of that
appearance.
With this experiential understanding it becomes obvious that there never has been a
separate, inside self, located in the body, experiencing an outside world. By the same
token, when we discover that the apparent subject within the body is a pseudo-subject,
we discover that the apparent object, other or world outside the body is a pseudo-
object. In other words, when we discover that there is no subject we simultaneously
discover that there are no objects.
This clear seeing of what we are is instantaneous – in fact, it is timeless – and once it is
our own experience it cannot be taken away. However, it is usually followed by an
apparent process in time by which the residues of ignorance – that is, ignoring what we
truly are and believing ourself instead to be a separate, limited self – slowly unwind in
the light of this understanding.
These residues have deeply conditioned the body and the mind, in most cases for
decades. At the level of the mind, ignorance consists in the belief that our self, aware
Presence, is located somewhere in the body, for instance behind the eyes. Once this core
idea about our identity has taken root, most subsequent thoughts about ourself contain
this belief at their origin.
Once this belief has been uprooted by clear seeing, all psychological thoughts, which
were previously founded upon it, no longer have any credibility. Such thoughts may still
appear from time to time, simply out of habit or inertia, and initially may look identical
to those that were present when the belief in a separate entity was still active.
However, they are very different. Their heart has been removed. In this case the thoughts
that seem to betray a belief in the separate entity are simply habits of the mind. They are
empty. There is no self in them; there is only the carcass left. In time this habit of
thinking on behalf of a separate entity shows up less frequently because it is no longer
substantiated by the belief that such an entity is real.

A similar process takes place with our feelings at the level of the body. It may seem to
take longer for this understanding to infiltrate the body because ignorance is more
deeply rooted there: for years the body has been considered to house the separate self.
At an early age we come to think and feel that this cluster of sensations called the body
is ‘me’ or that ‘I’ is located somewhere inside it. Through lack of clear seeing we really
think and feel that there is experiential evidence for the existence of a separate self
inside the body.
The body even adopts various postures, attitudes and behavioural habits that are
consistent with the belief and feeling that ‘I’ is somewhere inside it. These attitudes are
enshrined at the muscular and even skeletal level. For instance, an attitude of fear and
resistance may cause us to stand in a stooped or defensive posture, which will, over
time, shape our muscles and bones.
The clear seeing that there is no separate self residing in the body is instantaneous, but
that doesn’t mean that the contractions in the body that developed as a result of this
belief vanish instantaneously. They do not!
There is an apparent process in time during which these residues of ignorance at the
level of the body are gradually dissolved. And just as the body once expressed the
belief in our identity as a separate entity, so it now begins to realign itself with the new
understanding and feeling of our self as unlimited, unlocated Presence. In time, our
activities and relationships naturally and effortlessly begin to express this new
experiential understanding.
So there is an unfolding that takes place in the mind and the body after this self-
recognition has taken place. However, this unfolding is not an unfolding of a separate
self towards freedom or liberation. It comes from freedom and dissolves the residues of
the sense of being a separate self from the mind and the body.
How does this realignment take place? What do we do if we burn the toast when making
breakfast? We just open the window! In time the residues of smoke and the smell of
burning are naturally and effortlessly dissipated into the surrounding transparent air.
It is the same here. We simply abide knowingly as this open, empty transparent Presence
and welcome the residues of feeling, moving and acting on behalf of a separate, inside
self, without any agenda. We offer the density of the separate self to the openness and
transparency of Presence and allow them to be infused with its substance.
As the mind and body become more transparent they naturally and effortlessly begin to
express the love, freedom and intelligence that are inherent in our true nature of
impersonal, unlimited Presence.
Enjoyment, enthusiasm, creativity, friendship and humour are just some of its
expressions.

In India they liken the situation to a rope that has been burned in a fire. Although the
rope retains its shape and appearance, if it is touched it disintegrates. It is empty; it has
no substance. Its inside has been burned out.
In this analogy the belief in the separate self is the inside, the substance of the rope.
Understanding is the fire. The empty shell is the habits of thinking and feeling that
remain for some time.
These habits of thinking and feeling and, of course, the activities and behaviour that
spring from them, have been laid down over a period of many years or decades. They
are the conditioning that forms the reservoir of tendencies that go into the make of our
character.
Not all of this conditioning is dependent on the belief and feeling of being a separate
entity. However, many of those aspects that are dependent on it may have been laid
down very early in our lives and be embedded deep within the structure of the body and
mind. It takes time for these deeply ingrained habits of thinking, feeling, acting, relating
and behaving to percolate up into the light of Awareness.
After self-recognition has taken place we no longer have a vested interest in keeping
these aspects of our character concealed. We no longer resist them and therefore they
tend to manifest for a time more than they used to. However, it would be a
misinterpretation to think that such behaviour is a display of ignorance; it is simply the
surfacing and discarding of the residues of ignorance at the level of the body and mind.
Conversely, it would be a misunderstanding to condone any old obnoxious behaviour
with a mantra of ‘It all happens to no one.’ That is pseudonon-duality.
It is for each one to see whether the habits of feeling, acting and relating on behalf of a
separate, inside self betray the belief in a separate entity or whether they are simply old
residues that are working their way out of the system. Neither of these possibilities is a
problem.
The only problem would be to appropriate the ‘It all happens to no one’ mantra, thereby
using the non-dual teaching as a defence mechanism to perpetuate the sense of
separation.
THE TRUE REVOLUTION

All experiencing is utterly, intimately pervaded by our own self, aware Presence.
However, when we imagine that only one little part of it, this little body part, is
pervaded by myself but not all the rest, we find ourself with a problem. If we now call
this body part ‘me’, what are we going to call the other part, the part that is not
pervaded by myself, the ‘not me’ part?
And what could this other part be made of? It is no longer thought or, more importantly,
felt to be pervaded by the intimacy of our own being, so it must be made out of
something else. ‘Matter’ is the name we give to this ‘something else’, everything that is
‘not me’.
Our self is pervaded by alive, aware Presence, and so this substance called matter is
conceived of as not being pervaded by the intelligence and love that are inherent in our
self. It is considered to be dead, inert, separate from and other than love and
intelligence. However, no one has ever found this stuff called matter.
Over a hundred years ago the painter Paul Cézanne said, ‘A time is coming when a
single carrot freshly observed will trigger a revolution.’ Has this time come? And what
is the revolution Cézanne was suggesting? How long will it be before a scientist stands
up and admits that this stuff called matter has never been found – and, more importantly,
could never be found – because there is nothing that is not utterly, intimately pervaded
by Awareness? In fact, there are simply no things, as such.
This is the revolution Cézanne was suggesting, and what he was trying to draw attention
to in his work. If its implications are considered it will revolutionise every aspect of
our lives: intimate relationships, education, ecology, commerce, employment, politics…
everything.

Let us make sure that this understanding is experiential and not just a new non-dual
philosophy. Close your eyes and place your hand on your chair. Our only knowledge of
the chair is this new sensation. In fact, in this new sensation we do not experience a
hand and a chair. There is hand/chair. It is only thinking that abstracts and
conceptualises a hand and a chair from the intimacy and seamlessness of pure sensing.
Now, what is this new experience made of? The mind says that the hand is made of flesh
and bone and the chair is made of an inert substance called matter, but in experience all
we know is sensing. What is sensing made of? Is there any dead, inert material there, or
is sensing intimately, utterly pervaded by knowing, by Awareness?
Open your eyes and look at the wall in front of you. Our only knowledge of the wall is
seeing. There is nothing there other than seeing. How far from our self does seeing take
place? Does it take place ten metres from our self, or is it utterly, intimately one with
our self?
What in our actual experience is seeing made of? Is there any substance present in
seeing other than the intimacy of our own being? Is it solid, dense and inert, or is it
made only of knowing or Awareness?
Now imagine the moon. Do we have any knowledge of the moon other than seeing? And
how far away is that seeing — millions of miles, or right here in the dimensionless
intimacy of our own being?
Try to find anything that is at a distance from or separate from our self – not our self a
body, because that body is made only out of sensing, seeing, hearing, tasting and
touching, but our self this aware Presence.
See clearly that the mind, the body and the world are never actually found as such, that
is, as they are imagined to be. All we know is experiencing, and experiencing is utterly,
intimately one with and made out of our self, Awareness.
The mind, the body and the world are illusions as they are normally conceived to be.
However, that does not mean that experience is an illusion. Experience is real, and its
reality is the Awareness that we intimately know our self to be, that intimately knows
itself to be.
CONCEPTUALISING CONSCIOUSNESS

From Consciousness’s own point of view, if it can be said to have a point of view, it is
too close to itself, too completely itself, to know itself as any kind of object. For
anything to be known as an apparent object, there has to be a subject located at a
distance from it and, by definition, other than it.
To know an apparent object or other, we have to separate ourself from the seamless
totality as an experiencing subject, a centre or location within the totality from which all
seeming objects, others, events and so on are known or experienced. This is the way we
normally think the objects of the mind, body and world are known. That is, they are
apparently known in relationship.
However, for Consciousness, which is all there is, there is no other one that can stand
back and look at experience. It is neither the subject nor the object of its own
experience. This does not mean that Consciousness is unknown. It is only unknown in
the way we normally think knowing takes place, in relationship.
Consciousness is knowing. That’s what the word ‘Consciousness’ means: the presence
of that which is conscious, aware, knowing – the knowing of being or the being of
knowing. Consciousness doesn’t know itself as something; it is the knowing of itself. It
is knowing in identity, not in relationship.
Consciousness’s way of knowing itself is to be itself, and its being itself is so utterly
intimate, seamless and complete that there is no room there for an ‘other’. The only way
Consciousness can seem to know something that is other than itself is to take the shape
of thinking and imagine itself to be a limited, located entity, a centre of knowledge,
experience or perception, thereby giving rise to the possibility of other limited, located
entities.
Once thinking has imagined that Consciousness is limited to and located within the
body, it imagines, as a natural corollary to this belief, an outside world, object or other
that is separate and distant from this imaginary subject. It is with this imagining that the
world, others and objects seem to come into existence as separate, individual objects
with a reality of their own. The appearance of an apparent object is the natural and
inevitable outcome of the belief that Consciousness is the subject.
It is with this imagining of Consciousness as a separate entity that its own fullness,
imperturbability, innocence and intimacy are seemingly veiled and, as a result, that a
sense of lack and incompleteness, of having appeared and thus the possibility of
disappearing, of disease, loss and so on arise. By imagining Consciousness as an entity,
thinking imagines it to be less than completeness, less than totality, less than fullness. In
short, Consciousness seems to become mortal, limited and located in time and space.
In thinking of Consciousness in this way, an imaginary relationship is set up between ‘I’
– the apparently limited Consciousness that the mind imagines the real ‘I’ of
Consciousness to be – and all others, objects and the world. The mind thus sets
Consciousness apart from the totality, imagining it as a limited, located, separate entity,
and takes a position of ‘I, this imagined entity, do not like this’, ‘I want that’, ‘I feel a
lack’, ‘I am sick’ and so on.

All these ideas are inevitable corollaries to the belief in being a separate self. The
ultimate cure for them is simply to go to the reality of experience and, as a result, cease
believing oneself to be such. In fact, one doesn’t need to stop believing it; rather, the
belief simply falls away when it is seen to be untrue, leaving Consciousness as it is,
alone.
However, at this point we cannot really say it is ‘alone’ or ‘one’, for both need the
reference ‘other’ or ‘two’ to have any meaning. Even to call it Consciousness is too
much. It was only necessary to conceptualise Consciousness in the first place as an
antidote to the concept of objects, entities, others and the world. In the absence of these,
the concept of Consciousness is redundant.
There is only the seamless totality of experiencing, too utterly, intimately itself even to
know itself as any kind of an object. In this state, which is simply the natural state of
being, what we call Consciousness and what we call experiencing are identical.
It is only when the mind arises and seemingly fragments the seamless intimacy of
experience into an apparent multiplicity and diversity of objects that Consciousness is
conceptualised as the subject. At first it seems to become a subtle, unlocated, limited
and witnessing Consciousness, but as the conceptualising process intensifies and the
reality of experience is correspondingly veiled, this witnessing Consciousness is further
condensed in the imagination into an apparent mind and body.
Prior to the arising of mind, Consciousness is too completely full of itself for the
dualising mind even to get a purchase – there is simply nothing for it to get hold of. And
when the mind does arise it has to manufacture an object to legitimise its own existence.
Even when the mind is seemingly present, Consciousness doesn’t actually know itself as
an object. An object is only an object from the point of view of the mind. From
Consciousness’s ‘point of view’ it only knows itself. It does not and cannot know
anything other than itself. Strange as it may sound, that is all that is ever experienced,
including this very experience right now.
Water only knows itself as water. It is the mind that says ocean, wave, river, tears, rain,
cloud or puddle. Water knows nothing of such things. At the same time, it is the
substance of all such things, but in being so it is still only ever water and only knows
itself as water.
Love is one of the names we give to this recognition. It is simply not to know an other.
Beauty is another of its names. It is not to know an object.
Happiness is another. It is the absence of lack, or even fear of the possibility of lack,
due to Consciousness’s total saturation of itself in itself, eternally.
Peace is another of its names because there is nothing other than itself that could come
in ‘from anywhere’ and disturb it from being itself.
PRESENCE FINDS ONLY ITSELF

You say that the experience of the separate self and the outside world are two sides of
the same coin, that they are inseparable. I understand that there is no separate self
but the outside world seems very real. Objects, people, places seem very real.
‘Seems’ is the operative word. It is necessary to distinguish between what seems to be
and what is.
Your description of the world as being ‘outside’ implies that there is something inside.
That ‘something inside’ is the separate self, the counterpart of the separate world
outside. In this case the separate self has not truly been seen to be non-existent, and
therefore the world has not been seen to be similarly non-existent.
The separate self and the outside world are the inside and the outside of ignorance, the
ignoring of reality. They are both illusions superimposed onto the reality of experience.
Without the labelling by thought, we have no way of knowing what anything truly is. In
fact, even with the labelling of thought we do not know what anything really is, though
we think we do!
Without thought, there is no experience of an inside or an outside, a ‘me’ or an ‘other’.
Without thought, there is no ‘here’ or ‘there’, no ‘now’ or ‘then’, no ‘this’ or ‘that’.
Without thought, there is just the utter intimacy of experiencing, so completely full of
itself as to permit no other, no time, no lack and no need.
It is thought alone that seemingly divides experiencing into the mind, the body and the
world. These are the three realms of apparently objective experience, in which the
reality of experience is seemingly veiled from itself by dualising thought.
The mind, the body and the world are illusory only as apparent objects, as seemingly
‘other’. There is a reality to the experience of the mind, body and world, but the only
substance to that reality is aware Presence. In the same way, when we look at an image
on the screen, we do not really see trees, fields, hills and the sky; we always see only
the screen. The screen is their reality.
And what is it that knows the reality? It knows and simultaneously is itself. The reality
of experience could not be known by anything other than what is real.
But I can touch this table. I am seeing this chair.
You do not touch a table and you do not see a chair. There is no you, no table and no
chair.
‘You’, ‘table’ and ‘chair’ are simply concepts superimposed by the mind upon seamless,
objectless, ever-present experiencing.
If this is not clear, we could take an intermediary step and say that there is only sensing,
touching and seeing, as long as we understand that this is only provisionally true.
The only substance present in ‘you’, the body, is sensing. The only substance present in
the ‘table’ and the ‘chair’ is perceiving or seeing. In this way it becomes clear that all
we know of the body, table or chair is experiencing. The objects themselves are never
actually found.
What we thought was an object, body or world is seen to be made only of experiencing.
The mind superimposes the ‘experienced’ and the ‘experiencer’ onto pure experiencing.
If we look at experiencing itself, all we find there is aware Presence. And what is it that
‘finds’ or recognises Presence? Only itself.
We could say that mind appears to fragment and diversify Presence into thinking,
sensing and perceiving and then further fragments thinking, sensing and perceiving into
an apparent multiplicity and diversity of physical objects that are apparently known by a
separate self.
However, the separate self is not just a belief; it is also a feeling. It is not just the
concept of being an entity. It is the feeling that I am this body and/or I am in this body.
With the feeling that I am inside this body comes the feeling that everything I am not is
outside this body, that is, that the world is outside me.
‘I am in the body’ and ‘the world is outside and separate from me’ are not two different
feelings. It is one feeling, one line drawn through the seamless intimacy of experience,
that separates the ‘me’ from the ‘not me’. It is impossible to have the ‘me’ without the
‘not me’, and it is impossible to have the ‘not me’ without the ‘me’.
One belief/feeling apparently separates the oneness of experience into two, into ‘me’
and ‘other’. One belief/feeling apparently separates experiencing into an experiencer
and an experienced.
The mind seemingly separates Presence into someone who knows, ‘I’, and something
that is known, ‘the world’. Unhappiness, which is simply the veiling of ever-present
underlying happiness, is the result of this artificial separation.

Imagine going to an IMAX cinema, where we are given a special pair of three-
dimensional glasses. Without the glasses the image appears in two dimensions on the
screen as normal, but when we put on the glasses it seems as if the film is taking place
all around us in the entire space of the cinema and that we are situated within the three-
dimensional image, under the sea with the fish or on the plain with the lions.
If we take off our glasses at some point we will see all the children in the cinema (and
some of the adults!) stretching out their hands and trying to catch the fish. But they grab
only empty space.
It is exactly the same with the world. When we try to catch it, to hold it, to see what it is
made of, we find only the empty space of Presence. We are like children, thinking that
the fish are real and trying to touch them. But when we look clearly at our experience,
we find nothing objective there and, by the same token, nothing subjective.
Presence ‘puts on’ the mind, which appears to project a world outside itself. But the
mind is itself made out of the Presence from which it seems to be separated. The world
is separate from Presence in the same way that the sky is separate from space, that is, in
no way at all.
Thinking seems to objectify, divide and fragment the seamless intimacy of experience,
creating an apparent multiplicity and diversity of thoughts, objects, selves, others and
the world. Thinking creates the appearance of time out of timeless Presence, and this
appearance is called the dream state. Thinking creates the appearance of space and
objects out of spaceless Presence, and this appearance is called the body and the world,
that is, the waking state.
But when we ‘stretch out our hand’ and try to find time, thought, space, a body, an object
or a world, we find only Presence.
Presence finds only itself.
THE FABRIC OF IDENTITY

I understand that the separate entity is simply a belief but I still feel located in the
body.
The conviction that we are a separate and independent entity has two aspects. It is
composed of a belief and a feeling. The belief in separation is really the tip of the
iceberg. Most of the apparently separate ‘I’ is made of feelings that have one essential
feeling at their origin: that ‘I’, this unlimited, aware Presence that is seeing these words,
is located in the body or as the body.
The actual experience of the body comprises a cluster of sensations plus visual
perceptions, joined together by a concept that weaves them into the apparently complex
organism that we think of as our body. However, no such organism is ever experienced.
The sensations are experienced. The visual perceptions are experienced. The concept
of the body is experienced. But the body to which the concept refers is never
experienced as such.
The actual experience of the body is very simple. Close your eyes for a moment and see
that it is experienced simply as an amorphous cluster of sensations. All unhappiness has,
at its origin, the exclusive association of our self, aware Presence, with this cluster of
sensations. In most cases we no longer even realise that these two have been mixed up.
Presence and bodily sensations have been mixed up together for so long into an
amalgam of identity that many of us now feel simply that ‘I’ is the body, period.
This apparent mixture of our self, aware Presence, and a cluster of sensations requires
one thing only for its survival: obscurity! As long as it remains obscure, unseen, the
feeling of separation and the unhappiness that is its inevitable corollary are inevitable.
All that is needed is to look at it clearly with no agenda. We do not look at it in order to
get rid of it. We look at it simply out of interest. What is this separate, inside self that
thinking imagines us to be? The exclusive mixture of our self, aware Presence, and the
body cannot stand this passive and disinterested contemplation.
The feeling of being a body is like salad dressing. As long as it is constantly agitated it
appears to be one homogeneous substance, but as soon as it is left alone, the oil and the
vinegar separate naturally. The single ‘I am the body’ entity is, in the same way, not truly
single; it is made of Presence plus the body. The disinterested contemplation of the ‘I
am the body’ entity is the settling of the salad dressing, the discrimination between
Presence and the body object.
See clearly that when our eyes are closed, the so-called body is simply a cluster of
amorphous sensations appearing in unlimited, aware Presence.
These sensations are not identical to Presence; they appear in it. When our eyes are
open, a perception is added to this appearance that seems to substantiate the solidity and
depth of the body. If we now touch the chair with our hand, a tactile sensation is added
to the mix.
All of these sensations and perceptions are woven together by the mind into a fabric that
seems to be solid and permanent. However, our actual experience is that each of these
sensations and perceptions is fleeting and insubstantial. It is the aware Presence in
which they appear that gives them apparent substance and continuity. They borrow their
apparent permanence from Presence, from Awareness.
We think that the body is solid, lasting and substantial and that Awareness is fleeting,
impermanent and insubstantial. Our actual experience is the opposite. It is
Consciousness that is ever-present and substantial whereas the body is an ever-changing
flow of fleeting, impermanent and insubstantial sensations and perceptions.
The identity that we attribute to the body in fact belongs to Awareness. The ‘I am’ that is
inherent in Awareness is bestowed by thinking on a cluster of sensations and becomes ‘I
am the body’.
In fact, the ‘I am’ never becomes anything; it just seems to become a body. And as an
inevitable and simultaneous corollary to this self-contraction, everything that the body is
not becomes everything that ‘I am not’, that is, the world.
The mind creates a veil of apparent objectivity that is spun within Awareness and made
only out of Awareness and yet which seems to limit and locate our self, Awareness. As
a result, Awareness seems to take up residence inside the body and the world seems to
become distant and other.
In our passive and disinterested contemplation, the ‘I am’ and the body separate like oil
and vinegar. It is not that the ‘I’ returns to Awareness. It is rather that it is relieved of the
superimposition of thinking and stands revealed as it is.
The ‘I’ is relieved of its ‘insideness’ and ‘me-ness’, and the world is relieved of its
‘outsideness’, its ‘not-me-ness’.
Inside and outside, ‘me’ and ‘not me’, collapse and only our self, Awareness, remains.
UTTERLY, INTIMATELY ONE

At a certain point we no longer think or feel that we are an individual entity existing and
moving about in time and space amongst other entities.
Time, space, the separate entity and its counterpart, the world, are all super-impositions
upon our real nature. We think and feel that we are a limited, separate entity only
because we have forgotten our real nature.
As soon as we remember or recognise our true nature, time, space, the separate entity,
things, objects, others and the world all collapse back into the source from which they
seemingly arose. In fact, they never really collapse because they never truly arose to
begin with. Rather, they are seen for what they are, the ever-present reality of being,
insubstantial as appearance, real as being.
Imagine that we are watching a car chase on a screen and that the chase is being filmed
from inside one of the cars. Even in ordinary life, when we watch such a film our body
can become quite animated and disturbed as we feel that we are travelling inside the
car, hurtling through space, narrowly missing other cars, buildings and people.
At the end of the chase we become aware of the tensions in our body that have been
created as a result of identifying ourself with the point of view of the camera. Long after
the chase is over, indeed sometimes long after the film is over, these residues of feeling
may remain in the body.
However, at a certain moment in the film, and this moment is always available, it
becomes obvious that we are not in the car moving at terrific speed, narrowly missing
other objects. It becomes clear that the fate of the car is not our fate. There are no cars,
no people, no road and no buildings. There is just the screen.
Once we realise this we realise simultaneously that it has always been the case. It was
only our forgetting of this obvious and always available fact of experience that
precipitated the feeling that we were located inside a car, moving at great speed, in
danger at every moment. We realise that all this commotion is simply a play on the
screen, not in ourself. Simultaneously we realise that what are considered to be time,
space and causality for the characters in the movie are, for the screen, simply its own
ever-presence.
Does the screen ever become animated by the movement and the story of the film? Does
the screen move when the cars move? Does the screen get excited or disappointed?
Does it appear or disappear? Does it change or move as the image changes and moves?
The screen gains or loses nothing by the outcome of the film. It is not animated by the
images, nor does it share their apparent qualities. At the same time it is the very
substance of the image. Likewise, it is the forgetting of the true nature of our self that
precipitates the thought and feeling of being a separate entity moving around in a
separate and outside world.
Like the screen, our self, Awareness, is already all it could ever be. It stands to gain or
lose nothing by the appearances of the body, mind and world, whatever their condition.
At the same time it is their very substance. Just as the screen seems to take the shape of
the image in the film, so Awareness seems to become limited by the body and the mind,
but none of their apparent qualities pertain to Awareness. If we concede a relative
reality to the body and mind, we can say they are made out of nothing other than
Awareness.
What is it that changes and moves? The screen does not change and move, because it is
the one ever-present background and substance of the movie. Nor do the cars change
and move, because they are non-existent as such. It is only an image that moves and
changes. However, without thinking, even this image would not move and change,
because change and movement require memory, and memory is simply a current thought.

As soon as we forget our true identity as Awareness and become exclusively identified
with a part of the totality of whatever is appearing, separate entities and the world are
simultaneously born, and with them their first offspring, time and space.
The intimacy of experience is fragmented into a subject and an object, into a ‘me’ and an
other, into a person and a world, and time and space are simultaneously created to house
all these apparent entities. The forgetting of our true identity and the apparent reality of
the individual and the world are the same event.
From this moment onwards the individual that we imagine ourself to be, and the world
we imagine ourself to be moving through, seem to acquire a reality of their own. We
forget that their reality is only the reality of Awareness, just as we forget in the film that
the reality of the cars, people, buildings and chase are always only the screen.
Awareness is never truly obscured, just as the screen is never obscured; it only seems to
be obscured by our believing it to be so. At every moment, the knowledge that
Awareness is the sole background and substance of experience is available, just as the
knowledge that we are watching only the screen is always available.
Nothing needs to be done to effect this change other than to see clearly that it is always
already the case. However, whatever needs to be done to effect this clear seeing does
need to be done. What ‘needs to be done’ is called the search for happiness, and it is
inherent in the belief that we are a separate entity travelling in time and space.
As soon as we notice the screen, we cease to feel that we are located in the car
travelling at great speed and in constant danger. Similarly, as soon as we reclaim our
true identity as Awareness, which simply means to notice what we always already only
ever are, we cease to think and feel that we are a separate entity that was born and will
die, that travels through the waking state, enters a dream state and then falls asleep.
We no longer feel that we are an entity that is doing, choosing, feeling, thinking,
becoming, suffering, enjoying, achieving, sensing, perceiving, growing old, dying and so
on. Above all, we no longer think and feel that we are an entity that is located in time
and space, moving through life from beginning to end.
We realise instead that we are this ever-present, substantial, homogeneous, unmoving,
unchanging Presence. We think and feel that we are present, or rather, Presence itself,
not located in time and space, but rather here and now – not ‘here’ a place and ‘now’ a
time, but rather this dimensionless ever-presence.
It becomes clear that mind and matter are not the essential ingredients of experience,
and likewise that time and space are not the ultimate container in which our lives take
place. Mind, matter, time and space are all part of the image. But the image is made out
of Awareness. Awareness is the true and dimensionless container of all our experience.

We could say that entities, objects, people and events move through us, but even this is
not true. There are no entities, objects, people or events, just as there is no car tearing
across the screen. There is only the screen appearing as the cars, buildings, houses and
people. Likewise, there is only our self, aware Presence, immobile and unmovable,
unchanging and unchangeable, made out of nothing but itself, taking the shape of all that
appears without ever being or becoming anything other than what it eternally is.
In fact, experience doesn’t take place in Awareness. Experience is Awareness.
Awareness is the substance of itself alone. It is its own content.
Our self, Awareness, never goes anywhere or does anything. This becomes the felt and
lived reality of our lives. It is pure peace. Awareness stands silent and immobile,
unmoving, unchanging. We are the Presence from which every object derives its
apparent existence.
Just as the dervish, who has been turning around and around, suddenly feels still and
silent and sees clearly that it is rather the world and all others that are turning around
him, so we feel we that we are one solid block of silent Awareness shining in its own
light as every minute detail and gesture of life and experience.
Everything is intimately one with our self. Everything is intimately our self. No event is
greater or smaller than any other event. Nothing is more or less significant than anything
else. Nothing is more or less intimate than anything else. Greatness and smallness,
significance and insignificance, are for the mind, not for Awareness.
For Awareness, a falling leaf is no greater or smaller an event than an earthquake, just
as a falling leaf or an earthquake in a film is of no greater or lesser importance to the
screen. Neither is of any importance to the screen.
That does not mean there will not be an appropriate response to each event, perhaps a
smile in one case, intense action in another. However, both are equally the shape that
Awareness takes. Both reveal Awareness in equal measure.
When we wake up in the world as a person, we truly fall asleep. When we forget our
self, the peace, happiness and freedom that are inherent within our self are seemingly
veiled. We seem, as a result, to become a person that enjoys and suffers, and the world
seems to acquire its own reality as an abode of pleasure and pain.
Likewise, when we return to our self, which we have never in reality for a moment left,
when we awaken to our self, the person and the world fall asleep. They disappear as
such.
We stand eternally motionless and silent, watching our self taking the shape of every
minute detail of life, utterly and intimately one with each, fully giving our substance in
love to every appearance.
WE NEVER LOSE A FRIEND

All apparently objective experience is made of mind, in the broadest sense of the word,
that is, thinking, sensing and perceiving. All we know of objects, others and the world
comes through mind, through thinking, imagining, sensing, seeing, hearing, touching,
tasting and smelling. All these qualities belong to the mind. We have no evidence or
experience of objects, others or the world apart from or outside of mind. Nothing
objective remains of the current experience if we remove the mind from it.
Where does the mind appear? In Awareness. And what is the mind made out of? The
Awareness in which it appears. There is nothing else present out of which it could be
made.
It is not even quite right to say that the mind appears in Awareness, because this gives
the impression that the mind appears in Awareness like a piece of furniture appears in
the space of a room. A piece of furniture is something new that is brought into the room
from outside and made out of something other than the space of the room.
The mind, that is, thoughts, images, sensations and perceptions, is not brought in from
outside. Where is there, in our experience, that is outside Awareness, from where the
mind could appear?
Prior to the appearance of mind there is only Awareness. When the mind (including all
thoughts, images, our body, objects, others and the world) appears, the only substance
present out of which it could be made is Awareness.
If the mind is made out of that which is already present prior to its appearance, nothing
new can be said to have appeared when the mind appears. How do we even know the
mind appears? Who says so? Only the mind. There is only Awareness prior to mind,
there is only Awareness during the appearance of mind and there is only Awareness
when the mind subsides.
However, that too is only relatively true. We have already seen that time is utterly non-
existent as an actual experience. Where then are ‘prior to’, ‘during’ and ‘after’? Where
is the time before, during or after this current experience? Only in the current thought.
Likewise, when the mind changes, for instance when one situation disappears and
another appears, Awareness remains present and unchanged throughout. There is only
Awareness prior to the first situation, during its appearance, during the second situation,
after it disappears and so on, throughout all situations ad infinitum.
Again, that is only relatively true; it is said to establish the presence and primacy of
Awareness. It is truer than the conventional formulations of experience that imply the
absolute reality of time and space, but upon further investigation it is found not to be
completely true. There is always only Awareness, not always in time but rather ever-
present now. There is no other substance present in any situation.
If we take our stand in or as the body there seem to be a multiplicity of objects, people,
places, situations and events. If we take our stand in or as the mind there seem to be a
multiplicity of ideas and feelings. If we take our stand as Awareness, which is, in fact,
where we always stand whether we know it or not, there is always only one substantial,
ever-present, homogeneous, immovable, immutable reality.
Nothing comes or goes. Nothing moves or changes. Nothing is ever lost. Awareness is
prior to and within all seeming things. In fact, there are no things, nor any place or time,
past, present or future, in which apparent things can exist. There is only Awareness
itself.
If we take our stand knowingly as Awareness then we see clearly that all we could ever
be, become or achieve is already fully present ‘at every moment’. It is ever-present.
All that ever happens is made only of Awareness, and Awareness is ever-present. The
question of being, becoming or achieving anything other than Awareness is not a
possibility. In fact, nothing – no thing – ever truly ‘exists’ or ‘happens’.

With this understanding the question of purpose or meaning in life loses its validity. In
order to conceive of meaning or purpose we must first imagine ourself to be separate
and independent from Awareness. Meaning and purpose are only for that imagined one.
And, of course, that one is only a real entity from its own imagined point of view.
Awareness is already all it could ever be. It cannot become anything else, nor can it
cease to be what it always is. However, if we take our stand in or as the mind, there
will always be purpose, meaning, becoming and achieving. As a concession to this
point of view it could be said that the highest purpose and meaning is to come to this
experiential understanding of the seamless intimacy of life.
There are not two things. There is only Awareness. There is nothing for it to be or
become that it is not already. Experience consists of only one substance, and this
substance is always fully present, fully known. It cannot not be known. It is the knowing
of itself alone. It cannot know anything other than itself.
Even in ignorance, that is, in the apparent ignoring of the true nature of experience, there
is nothing other than Awareness knowing itself. Therefore, there is no real ignorance.
Purpose and meaning always need an other, a future, a process. But Awareness is all
there is. Things move and change only from the point of view of the mind, and the mind
is only real from the point of view of the mind. From the point of view of Awareness,
nothing moves or changes. Nothing – no thing – is.
In the words of Shakespeare, ‘All things seem but cannot be.’ There is only Awareness,
our self, Presence.
There is no question of doing or not doing, of achieving or not achieving. Awareness is
the only substance present in experience. Where could it go? What could it become?
Into what could it disappear? Out of what could it arise? In order to speak of coming
and going, appearing and disappearing, doing or not doing, achieving or not achieving,
bondage or liberation, we must first imagine our self to be something other than
Awareness, that is, we must first imagine our self to be a body and/or a mind.
Nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing is born or dies, nothing appears or disappears.
It is only the mind that claims all these things, but the mind itself is made only out of the
immovable, changeless, birthless, deathless presence of Awareness.
If we take our stand in or as the mind, we seem to become a separate entity, moving,
changing, growing, becoming, appearing, disappearing, enjoying, suffering, searching,
finding, being born and dying. If we take our stand knowingly as Awareness, we know
our self as the one immutable, substantial reality in all experience, ever-present,
consistent, homogeneous, without beginning or end.
That which is present when we are face-to-face with a loved one is only this Presence.
Their image, sound, touch, taste or smell is made only of this Presence. When our loved
one dies or leaves, this Presence remains as it always is, fully present.
Whether we remember them or not, that out of which they were made when they were
present with us is still ‘here’, still staring itself in the face.
This Presence is the substance of all relationship. In fact, it is the absence of
relationship. There are not two things, two people, to be related with each other. There
is only knowing in identity.
There is only Presence knowing itself from moment to moment. It is known as love. We
never lose a friend.
ABIDING KNOWINGLY AS PRESENCE

What effect does this understanding have on our everyday lives, and in what way
does it contribute to humanity?
A very profound effect! If we think and feel that we are a limited, separate entity, this
fundamental belief will dictate most of our thoughts, feelings, relationships and
activities.
If we look at all the problems facing individuals, couples, families, institutions,
communities, races and nations, there seem to innumerable causes for each problem. On
a relative level this may be true, but if we trace back the causes of all psychological
conflict and suffering to their essential origin, we always end up with the core belief in
the existence of a separate entity endowed with free will, choice, freedom and so on,
moving around in a world of time and space.
Just as the belief and, more importantly, the feeling of being a separate entity in a
separate, outside world is the single fundamental cause for psychological conflict and
suffering, so the experiential understanding of the true nature of our identity is its
remedy.
Prior to this understanding, most of our thinking, feeling, acting and relating revolves
around the central belief that what we are is a limited, personal consciousness born into
a body, evolving through time and space and destined for death.
A life based on such a belief is one of an almost constant search for peace, happiness
and love, punctuated by moments of rest and fulfilment. After these moments of brief
respite, the old habits of thinking, feeling, acting and relating on behalf of a separate
entity reappear and the apparent entity is again propelled into a search for objects that
will supposedly fulfil the sense of lack and allay the sense of fear that are inherent
within it.
However, with the clear seeing that the Awareness we know our self to be is
impersonal, unlimited and ever-present, and is not only the witness but also
simultaneously the substance of all experience, the belief in being a separate entity and
all its attendant thoughts, feelings and activities slowly, in most cases, die down. As a
result of this, the agitation of the mind and the tensions in the body that depended for
their existence on the belief that we are a limited, separate entity dissipate.
All the other thoughts, feelings and activities that were characteristic of a particular
body and mind tend to continue. Now that the body and the mind are no longer labouring
under the dominion of a demanding, fearful entity, their energies are liberated and made
available to express, share, communicate and celebrate the love and intelligence that are
inherent in this new understanding. How this sharing takes place will vary enormously
from one body/mind to another, but the essential communication will always be the
same: loving, friendly, creative, enjoyable, enthusiastic.
All psychological problems rely on the apparent presence of the separate entity, so
when this entity is seen to be non-existent all our psychological problems evaporate.
There may still be practical problems, but these will be dealt with as best as is possible
given the prevailing circumstances and will not generate suffering.
Now that we are no longer serving the dictates of an imaginary and tyrannical entity, we
may well find that we have a great deal of time and energy on our hands – the separate
entity is a voracious, insatiable master!
If we make a deep exploration of our true nature we find that peace, happiness and love
are inherent in it. In fact, they are not qualities that are inherent in it; rather, they are the
names we give to Awareness when it recognises itself. For this reason, thoughts,
feelings and activities that come directly from this experiential understanding,
unmediated by an imagined separate entity, tend to express these qualities.

Even if we are simply open to the possibility that Awareness is not limited, located or
personal, we can explore and experiment with this possibility in our lives.
Go deeply into your experience and establish yourself in the experiential understanding
that you are this aware Presence, and see from there that there is no evidence that this
Presence is either limited, located or personal. If there is no evidence that Presence is
limited, located, personal or temporal we cannot be sure that the one we are speaking to
over the phone, across the checkout counter, in our intimate partner or in a friend is not
the same Presence that is truly our own self.
We cannot know with the mind whether this is true or not because the mind has no
knowledge of that in which it appears. However, we can know it in experience. Having
lived for so many years under the presumption that Awareness is limited and located, try
living the opposite possibility. Treat all others and animals as this very Presence that
you intimately know yourself to be. Allow all your activities and relationships to flow
from this understanding.
And having understood that there are no objects – that our only knowledge of objects is
perceiving and that perceiving is made out of Awareness – treat all apparent objects
also as this very Presence that you are. In other words, treat everything as your self and
see how the universe responds. After all, the universe appears in conformity with our
beliefs.
If we are truly concerned about peace in the world, the highest service we can render
that world and our fellow beings is to investigate and explore the reality of our
experience, to stand knowingly as that reality and to live a life that flows from that
experiential understanding, that is, from love and understanding.
In time, if we truly take our stand as Presence, the belief in the reality of a person,
object, other or world gradually, rapidly or, in rare cases, instantaneously, dissolves.
We find ourself spontaneously, effortlessly and peacefully at the heart of experience, and
the activities of the mind and body naturally express this stance.
If we stand knowingly as Presence we see Presence everywhere. That is, it experiences
only itself. In fact, it is always only experiencing itself, but it is now no longer
apparently obscured by the convolutions of the dualising mind.
Everything that comes from this experiential understanding delivers it, whether or not it
is couched in correct non-dual terms and whether or not it even tries to express it in
words.
PRESENCE BREATHES OUT THE WORLD

Presence never moves, does or becomes anything other than itself. If we take our stand
as aware Presence, knowingly, we truly feel that we do nothing and go nowhere. All
doing and going are for the mind alone.
For Presence, which simply means in our actual experience, there is no time, just
timeless Presence in the same placeless place, the ever-present, timeless now. But it is
not aloof, remote, static – it gives itself intimately and utterly to every appearance of the
mind, the body and the world.
A character in a film may grow up, get a job, have a family, travel the world, grow old
and die, but the screen doesn’t do any of these things. The screen is the entire substance
of the character’s life, and yet at the same time it always remains itself without moving,
doing or becoming anything.
When we take our stand as Presence we know our self as the reality of all experience,
the ‘I’ in all seeming people and the ‘it’ of all seeming things. We do not think or feel
that we are a person thinking, feeling, doing, choosing and so on, going towards the truth
or away from it. We have taken our stand as Presence and understand and feel that the
mind, including all thinking, sensing and perceiving, proceeds from and unfolds within
our self.
It is like breathing in and out. As Presence breathes out, as it were, it creates the
appearance of mind within itself, made only out of itself, and the mind contains, or
rather is, all images, thoughts, sensations and perceptions. As Presence breathes in, it
folds the appearances of mind back up within itself.
At no stage does Presence ever forget that it is itself. It never goes out of itself. It never
truly confers its own reality upon an object, and yet it is its own reality that gives
apparent existence – apparent standing-out-as-an-object-ness – to all seeming things.
The apparent forgetting of Presence is only as real as the actor who seemingly forgets
himself in order to play the role of Hamlet. Presence remains itself, abiding in and as
itself. It is ever-present, at home within itself, as itself.
The particular character of each perception no longer has the power to deceive the mind
into thinking that Presence is anything other than itself and therefore no longer has the
power to veil the peace and happiness that are inherent within it.
The mind can no longer be persuaded into thinking that Presence is an object, entity or
world. In fact, it cannot be persuaded that anything is an object of any kind. Nothing can
take Presence away from itself. Where would it go? Where could it go?
Nothing need be resisted or feared any longer, because it is seen clearly that nothing
could ever have or indeed did ever have the power to rob Presence of itself. The fear of
being diminished or of disappearing, and the need or desire to be aggrandised in any
way, dissolve. The natural condition of peace, happiness and freedom is revealed.
It is seen that nothing can threaten or harm Presence, so the subtle rejection of the
current situation that characterises the separate entity disappears, and with the
disappearance of the ‘No’ we find a ‘Yes’ within ourself that is intimately, unreservedly
present at the heart of all experience.
This ‘Yes’ is love.
DEVOTION

Is there a place for Bhakti or devotion in this approach?

To be truly devoted means to give our whole self to the object of our devotion at all
times. The only object worthy of or even available for such devotion or love must be
something that is always present, for we cannot give ourself completely to something
that is intermittent.
There is no true object of devotion, because all objects are intermittent. Only
Awareness is ever-present, and therefore only Awareness merits true devotion. And
what could give Awareness this devotion? Obviously an intermittent object such as a
body or a mind cannot render devotion to something that is present when it itself is not.
Therefore, only Awareness is able to impart this devotion to itself.
It is only Awareness that can be truly loved and it is only Awareness that can truly love.
However, Awareness does not love and is not loved. It is love. So the highest form of
love or devotion is simply to abide as Awareness, knowingly. Any other sort of
devotion would be the devotion of an imagined entity for an imagined object.
However, the imagined entity that looks for a direction in which to turn and for
something to turn towards does not realise that the attention it is apparently using for this
purpose is already the Awareness that it seeks. It is like a current of water searching the
ocean for water.
‘Lord, Thou art the love with which I love Thee.’
Every object or direction which appears as a possible recipient of the mind’s devotion
is an object it has created within itself and cannot therefore be the true object of its
devotion. Any object is simply more mind.
As the mind searches for a direction in which to turn, it is, without knowing it to begin
with, tracing itself back to its source. Finally, having explored all directions, it reaches
a dead end. It comes to the knowledge that there is no known direction in which it can
turn, nor is there an object worthy of true devotion. In short, the mind cannot know what
devotion is.
With this understanding the mind falls silent, which means it dissolves. What is revealed
is devotion. Devotion is what we are, not something we do.
The investigation within the mind for the true object of devotion is sometimes known as
self-enquiry. It is a concession to the mind that thinks it has the capacity to direct its
attention at will towards an object.
This investigation is not a process of the mind going towards its source, although it may
appear to be so to begin with. It is rather the dissolution of the apparent mind in its
source. How could a mind go towards Awareness? In what direction would it go?
Even that formulation is not quite right: only something that is not the source could
dissolve in its source. The mind has no other substance than Awareness, so there is
nothing there to be dissolved. The idea of the dissolution of the mind in its source is part
and parcel of the mind’s belief that it is something other than its source. The existence of
a source from which something emerges is a dualistic idea which itself dissolves upon
understanding that there is no independent entity, mind or object.
When an image that seems to veil the screen fades, leaving only the screen in view, does
the image really dissolve? The image is made only of screen, and the screen does not
dissolve. However, by seeming to become something other than itself (the image), the
screen seems to become hidden and the subsequent fading of the image seems to reveal
the screen.
Likewise, the mind is an appearance within Awareness, made only of Awareness, but it
has the capacity to appear to veil the Awareness out of which it is made. In self-enquiry
the mind fades like the image on the screen, leaving only the background of Awareness
in plain view.
It is the source itself, Awareness, which gradually reclaims the mind. In taking the shape
of mind, Awareness appears to become something other than itself, something separate,
other and outside. At the end of every perception, Awareness folds the mind back up
within itself and ceases the apparent veiling of itself with its own creativity.
It is not the mind that undertakes this process, any more than it is the image on the screen
that is responsible for its own dissolution. The mind does nothing. The mind is not an
independent entity with the capacity to do or not to do anything.
It was always only Awareness that was in plain view, simultaneously the background
and the foreground.
THE ARCH IMPERSONATOR

The ‘I’ thought is like a filler that the mind comes to rest upon when it is not occupied
with creative, loving, enquiring or practical thoughts. As soon as such thoughts are
finished, the mind creates a pseudo-self, a pseudo-doer, thinker, feeler, who claims the
credit for the previous activities.
This imagined separate self becomes the default position for the mind, like the screen
saver on a computer screen, which is there to obscure the apparent dullness of the blank
screen when no other documents are open. The screen is considered to be dull only from
the point of view of the images, because it is the complete absence of everything they
know, that is, the complete absence of objects.
The screen in itself is not an absence. It is Presence. In fact, it is the sole substance of
the apparent images. It is an absence only from the point of view of the images.
Likewise, from the point of view of the mind, which knows only apparent objects,
Awareness is a boring nothingness. It does not know and cannot know that Awareness is,
in fact, its own substance. To avoid this apparent nothingness of Awareness, the mind
creates a pseudo-Presence, a pseudo-identity, the separate, inside self, which
impersonates the true presence of Awareness.
This pseudo-self gives the mind something to be busy with in between other thoughts,
images, sensations and perceptions. The pseudo-self seems to become the background
of our experience, apparently always present, running between and within all other
perceptions. It is the arch impersonator.
As our exploration of the nature of experience deepens, it becomes more and more
obvious that the pseudo-self is not the permanent background of experience but rather
one of the innumerable changing faces of experience itself. It is seen clearly that the
screen saver is not the background and substance of all the documents, but simply
another image.
At this stage the apparently inside self is understood to be an object rather than the
subject of experience, and as a result it ceases to be the default position of the mind, in
between all other thoughts and images. It is understood to be simply another thought or
image.
The screen saver, which was created to prevent the apparent dullness of the screen ever
having to be experienced, is removed and the screen itself becomes visible. This is the
moment of Awareness recognising its own being and no longer seeming to veil itself
with the mind. It is the cessation of ignorance, or Awareness’s apparent ignoring of
itself.
This timeless moment is the recognition that Awareness is not a blank emptiness, not the
nothingness the mind previously conceived it to be, but rather the fullness out of which
the apparent fullness of the mind is made. In fact, from this perspective it is the
separate, inside self that is truly empty, a nothingness, a non-existent thing.
The default position now becomes the screen itself, not the screen saver. That is, our
default position becomes Awareness rather than the separate self. It becomes more and
more natural for the mind simply to come to rest in its own source than to manufacture a
separate, inside self in between its activities of thinking, sensing and perceiving.
THE APPARENT FORGETTING OF OUR OWN BEING

The question of choice and personal doership in this exploration of experience arises
frequently. I’m struggling with the conflict between myself as the doer versus the
non-doer.
Our apparently objective experience consists of thoughts, images, sensations and
perceptions. Only one object can appear at a time, so it would be more accurate to say
that at any moment there is one thought/image/sensation/perception present. See clearly
that there is only ever one appearance present at a time, just as there is only ever one
image present on a TV screen at a time.
It is thinking alone that splits the current experience into a multiplicity of objects, such
as words, hands, table, walls, sky and so on, just as it is thinking that imagines the single
TV screen comprises houses, people, cars, the street and so on. In our actual experience
there is only ever ‘one thing’ appearing at any moment. Later it will be seen that, in fact,
there isn’t even one ‘thing’ present; there is only Presence, present to itself.
This ‘one thing’ that seems to be present is a seamless whole, just as the image on the
screen is a seamless whole. It is only thinking that draws imaginary lines around parts
of the image to create an apparent multiplicity and diversity of objects.
Now take the current appearance, this current experience, and see that the entire
appearance is permeated with the Awareness that knows it, just as the entire image on
the screen is permeated by the screen on which it appears. See that Awareness does not
permeate one part of the current appearance any more than another part, just as the
screen does not permeate one part of the image that appears on it any more than another
part.
Everything is equally permeated by and saturated with Awareness. In fact, there are no
separate parts in experience, any of which could be more or less permeated by
Awareness. There is just one seamless whole, just as there is only one seamless,
indivisible image on the screen.
No apparent part of experience is any closer to or farther away from Awareness than
another. In fact, there are no parts to experience that could be at varying distances from
Awareness. When anything appears it is so utterly and intimately one with the
Awareness that knows it that there is not the slightest room for any distance or
separation from it. There is not even an object, other or world, as such, there in the first
place that could subsequently be divided in parts.
It is thought that rises up and imagines that Awareness does not equally and intimately
pervade all experience. This thought veils the presence of Awareness and, as a result,
divides experience into two parts: one part, the body and mind, that is considered to be
permeated by Awareness and becomes the separate, inside self, and another that is
considered not to be pervaded by Awareness and becomes the separate, outside object
or world.
With this thought the reality of Awareness is no longer felt and understood to be the
essence of all experience – both ourself and the world – but is considered to be the
reality of only ourself. Thought now imagines that this separate, inside self, which is an
illusory thought-and-feeling-made self, is autonomous. It becomes the knower, feeler,
perceiver and doer.
It is this imaginary self that now has to invent a reality that belongs to the world. The
separate existence of the world, with its own independent reality apart from Awareness,
is only considered true and real from the imaginary point of view of the separate, inside
self. In other words, objective reality is created by the subjective self. Having created
an apparently real world (by forgetting the true and only reality of Awareness), thought
again divides up this world of its own making into an apparent multiplicity and diversity
of parts, one of them being the separate, inside self.
Having imagined a separate, inside self and a separate, outside world of objects and
others, thought then locates this separate, inside self at the centre of experience and
positions all apparent objects and others at varying distances from it, some close and
others far. Hence time, space, objects and causality are all apparently created in thought.
It is thought alone that first imagines a world made of parts and then decrees that some
parts are permeated by Awareness and others are not. It is as if the screen were to say, if
it could speak, that some parts of the image are one with the screen and others are not.
But what would those other parts of the image appear on if they didn’t appear on the
screen? And what would those parts be made out of if they were separate from the
screen? What other substance is present there in the image, apart from the screen, out of
which such a separate part could be made?
That part of the seamless totality of experience that thought considers to be permeated
by Awareness is called ‘me’, and that part of the totality that it considers not to be
permeated by Awareness is called ‘not me’. That part of the totality that is considered to
be ‘me’ is the thinking, feeling and sensing part, that is, the mind and body. And that part
of the totality that is considered to be ‘not me’ is the perceived part, that is, objects,
others and the world.
It is as if the screen were to think it is only present in one little part of the image that is
appearing on it, just one little person, but not all the rest, not the others, the trees, the
fields, the sky, the cars, the buildings and so on.
The apparently separate entity and the apparently separate world are simultaneously co-
created in thought by an imaginary division of the seamless intimacy of experience.

Now, what relation does all this have to the question about the conflict between oneself
as the doer versus the non-doer?
The doer – and, while we are talking about it, the thinker, the feeler, the chooser, the
lover, the decider, the enjoyer, the sufferer and so on – is considered to be this little
separate entity that thought has artificially created within the totality and divided from it.
This doer is not an entity. It has no separate reality of its own. It is simply a thought that
has exclusively associated our self, Awareness, with a little cluster of sensations.
Our experience is one seamless whole. It is not composed of separate parts, one part
acting on another, one part giving and the other receiving, one loving and the other
loved, one part dictating and the other part dictated to. So the conflict between ‘me’ as
the doer versus the non-doer is an artificial one. It can never be resolved at the level on
which it appears, because the entities around which it revolves are non-existent. There
are no selves, entities, parts, objects or others, as such, anywhere to be found in
experience.
There is simply experiencing – thinking, sensing and perceiving – whose entire
substance is made out of the Awareness that knows it. And when there is no thinking,
sensing or perceiving, the essence of experiencing remains as it always is, Awareness
simply being/knowing/loving itself. Thinking, sensing and perceiving appear in
Awareness like a current appears in the ocean, a modulation, as it were, of its own
substance.
From the point of view of the separate, inside self, experiencing comprises many things
– people, cars, buildings, houses, trees and so on – but from the point of view of
Awareness, which is, in fact, just the point of view of our own experience, there is just
‘one thing’.
And what is that ‘one thing’? It is itself! Awareness doesn’t see or know objects, others
or the world, as such. It sees or knows only the pure, nameless intimacy of experiencing.
That is, it knows itself alone. Only an imaginary inside self knows an imaginary outside
object, other or world. Awareness knows no such thing.
To know an object is to seemingly not know Awareness, and to know Awareness, that is,
in Awareness’s knowing of itself, no object is known
It is only thinking that apparently knows objects, others and the world, and thought’s
point of view is an imaginary one. Thought only has a legitimate point of view from its
own illusory point of view. It is like one part of the image on the screen having a point
of view.
There is only one legitimate point of view, that of Awareness, and it is not a point of
view because it is not viewing the whole from any particular vantage point. It is the
whole already. Being itself is the way it knows itself. It doesn’t know itself in subject–
object relationship; in fact, it doesn’t know itself in relationship at all. It knows itself in
love, which is the collapse or absence of all separation and relatedness.
So how is it possible for thinking to imagine its illusory point of view? It first has to
deny or forget the existence of Awareness. Or, to be more accurate, thinking rises up and
seems to obscure the Awareness in which it appears, just as a three-dimensional image
seems to veil the two-dimensional screen. The moment thinking does this, the reality of
experience, Awareness simultaneously being, knowing and loving itself, is seemingly
forgotten. As a result, an imaginary reality made out of something other than Awareness,
called ‘matter’, can be imagined.
‘Objects’, ‘others’ and the ‘world’ are simply the names and forms that thinking gives to
the apparent forgetting of our own being, Awareness.
Conversely, as soon as Awareness remembers or recognises itself, so to speak, by
ceasing to arise as the dualising thought that appears to obscure its own reality from
itself, the apparent objectivity or otherness of the world and the apparent subjectivity of
the self collapse, and experience is known for what it truly is, pure Awareness alone. It
recognises itself.
That recognition is the experience of peace, happiness, beauty or love.
THE NATURAL STATE OF OPENNESS AND TRANSPARENCY

I am noticing now that there seems to be an egoic backlash happening since ‘seeing’
happened – lots of emotional pain coming up, things hurting that haven’t hurt for a
long time, lots of anger, fear, everything uncomfortable. It feels like there is a
wrestling match going on inside. How is that possible?
That is a very good sign! This egoic backlash that you describe is to be expected (in
some cases) and welcomed.
Imagine a deep, dark well in whose depths a number of creatures live in a state of
slumber. At noon every day, when the sun is directly above the well, these creatures
wake briefly and rise to the surface towards the light. As the sun passes, darkness again
fills the well and the creatures return to their previous slumber at the bottom.
The sun, in this metaphor, is our self, aware Presence. The well is the apparent person
and the creatures are all the dark, uncomfortable feelings that you describe.
Under normal circumstances, much of our thinking and activity is undertaken in order to
avoid having to feel these dark, difficult feelings. However, as we begin to take our
stand as aware Presence, these habitual strategies of denial and avoidance are revealed.
Hence your description of emotional pain that been buried for a long time now coming
to the surface.
As we take our stand as aware Presence we find that we no longer have any agenda
with the mind, body or world. Those dark feelings are now free to surface unsuppressed
and to be fully felt. These feelings are the old residues of ignorance at the level of the
body. They are habits of feeling that result from our old identification with the body, that
is, from taking ourself to be a limited entity. Although it takes only a moment to see that
we are the clear space of aware Presence, it takes time for the body and the mind to
become realigned with this experiential understanding.
If we subscribe to these feelings we immediately seem to become an apparent person
again. However, we should not resist them with will power or discipline. In fact, these
feelings want us to get busy with them, avoiding them, getting rid of them, suppressing
them or attending to them in one way or another, because it is precisely this activity of
avoidance that keeps them alive.
There is only one thing these feelings cannot stand, and that is being clearly seen for
what they are.
Having understood this, there is no need to be moved by them. Welcome them lovingly
into yourself. Allow them to arise, to display themselves fully, to recount their old story
and to vanish in their own time. Remain knowingly your self, aware Presence,
throughout.
These feelings rely on our having an agenda with them. Every time they are met with our
welcoming openness, as opposed to our resistance, we rob them of their power. That is,
we rob them of their apparent power to veil our being, aware Presence. In time, their
ferocity will diminish because they are based on an old story that is no longer believed
– the old story of a separate self.
It is important to be sure that there is no agenda with them, that we are not welcoming
them in order to get rid of them. The feelings you describe thrive on this kind of subtle
agenda.
Once it has been clearly seen that the separate self around whom these feelings revolve
is utterly non-existent, their heart has been removed. Only waves of innocuous bodily
sensations remain. In due course, those feelings that were dependent for their existence
upon the belief in a separate self will die down. They die of clear seeing and neglect.
Once the mind and body are no longer presided over by the apparent separate self, they
gradually return to their natural state of openness, transparency, sensitivity, availability
and love.
OUR TRUE SECURITY

In exploring our direct experience, I often wonder how much we can trust it. When
one sees a mirage in a desert, if one were not aware of such a phenomenon one would
consider it to be real. Similarly, are we not limited by the human senses and
Consciousness in our discovery of truth? I know that is all we have but I wonder to
what extent we can use it and base our conclusions on it.
You are quite right to suggest that nothing that appears within the mind, the body or the
world can be completely trusted or relied upon. However, Consciousness and being are
absolutely certain. It is helpful to understand clearly why this is so, because such an
understanding would prevent us from ever putting our trust in the wrong place again.
You give the example of the mirage in the desert. Another example is the dream state.
During a dream our experience seems to have the same reality as that of the waking
state, but upon waking we discover that its apparent reality was illusory. How then, as
you imply, do we know that the current experience of the mind, body and world are not
also illusory? We don’t! So what can we be absolutely certain of?
In order to answer this question we have to first understand what it is that qualifies an
experience as being illusory. How do we know that the water in the desert or the
buildings in the dream are not real? It is the fact that when we go towards these objects
or experiences and try to find them or touch them, they are not there. They have
disappeared. The substance out of which we thought they were made (‘mind’ in the case
of the dream and ‘matter’ in the case of the mirage) is not present.
Even if we go towards the apparent reality of ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ in the waking state we
do not find them.
If ‘disappearance’ is the criterion by which we qualify something as being unreal, then
presence without disappearance must be the criterion by which we qualify something as
being real. Whatever it is that is truly present and therefore real in any experience
cannot disappear, because that into which it would disappear (which must also be
present in every experience in order for the experience to disappear into it) would be
more real than it.
Therefore, everything that appears and disappears must have a background or a support
on which to appear, which is at the same time more real than and inseparable from
every appearance. For instance, the screen doesn’t disappear when the image
disappears, and in that sense it is more real than the image.
Likewise, whatever it is that is real in every experience cannot change, in the sense that
water is ‘more real’ than its changing forms of ice or steam. A simple look at our
experience tells us this. The reality of experience is ever-present, although the
apparently changing forms of experience are always disappearing.
Whatever is real in any experience cannot appear or be born, because that from which it
would appear or be born (which must also be present and inseparable from it at the time
of its birth) would be more real than it, in the sense that gold is ‘more real’ than an
ornament.
Similarly, whatever is real in our experience must know or illumine itself, for if it were
known or illumined by something other than itself, that ‘something’ (which would have
to be present at the same time as the experience that was known or illumined) would be
more real than itself.
Therefore, whatever is truly real and present in our experience must be without
appearance or disappearance. It must be changeless, that is, it must be ever-present. It
must know itself and be its own cause. So we can now simplify our question and ask, is
there anything in our experience that is ever-present, changeless, self-illuminating, self-
knowing and self-causing?
And the answer is yes, our own being, aware Presence or Consciousness. Our self is the
reality that runs unchanging throughout all experience.
Only this ever-present, changeless and aware self can be absolutely trust-worthy. An
intermittent object cannot, by definition, be worthy of absolute trust, because on what
would we place our trust when it was absent? Trust or hold onto that self or aware
Presence alone.
But what could hold onto that? Obviously an intermittent object, such as a personal self,
cannot hold onto the ever-present reality of our experience, so an apparent separate self
cannot hold onto aware Presence. Aware Presence alone can ‘hold onto’ itself. It is all
that is present ‘there’ throughout its own ever-presence. However, it is already itself, so
there is no need for it to make an effort to hold onto itself. Aware Presence cannot lose
itself. It cannot ‘not be’ itself.
In order to know that element of our experience that is worthy of trust, all that is needed
is to abide as the aware Presence that we always already are. This simple knowing of
our own being is the irreducible and indestructible reality of our experience.
That is the only certainty, our true security.
THE RECOGNITION OF BEING

Is thinking a barrier to the realisation of one’s true nature?

It is not necessary to be without thought, because what we are is present both when
thoughts are appearing and when they are not. Think of thoughts just as you think of the
changing weather – they make no difference to your self at all. Just let them float by
while you remain your self.
Changing or getting rid of thoughts makes no difference to our self, just as the changing
weather makes no difference to you sitting peacefully on the sofa. Our self, aware
Presence, is always sitting peacefully on its sofa!
Is the self that is to be known different from the self that knows? No! All that is required
for the self to be known is the presence of the one self that we already and always are.
This self is prior to thought. It knows thought. It is knowing or experiencing these
words. No alteration of the mind, just as no alteration in the weather, could make any
difference to knowing or being our self.
One does not need to think in order to be or know oneself. At best, thinking can take
thinking to its own end. Thinking can explore and discover that not only does it have no
knowledge of the fundamental reality of experience but it cannot have any such
knowledge. ‘I know that I know nothing’ is the best that thought can do!
In order to come to this understanding so that it is really true for us and has not simply
been adopted as one more belief, we must first taste the non-objective and timeless
experience of our self knowing its own being.
The line of thinking that culminates in the end of the seeking thought comes from the
experience of our true nature. It does not go towards it.
With this understanding the seeking thought comes naturally and effortlessly to an end,
not as a result of discipline, effort, suppression, denial or belief, but rather through
understanding. There is simply nowhere else for it to go. It just lies down quietly.
It is the timeless, non-objective experience of the simple knowing of our own being – its
knowing of itself – that dissolves thought. It is not thought that leads to the knowing of
our own being.
Whether or not this cessation of thought takes place, see clearly that you are the knowing
or experiencing Presence that runs unchanging throughout all appearances of the mind,
body and world.
I’ve been operating according to the idea that it is almost impossible to let go of
mental patterns that operate unconsciously and that I have to know such a pattern of
thinking first in order to let go of it and abide in my true nature.
Leave all those mental habits and patterns alone. The self that is apparently operating,
that seems to know these patterns and that would let go of them is itself simply one such
pattern.
These patterns of thinking and feeling have taken their shape, over the years, from the
belief that we are a separate self, without our making any particular effort. In just the
same way, as our experiential conviction that we are not a limited, located self deepens,
so our thoughts, feelings and subsequent behaviour will slowly, effortlessly and
naturally realign themselves with this new understanding.
In order to know our self we do not need to know the mind. No other knowledge than the
knowledge that is present right now in this very moment is required to know our self.
What does it mean to know our self? We are our self, so we are too close to our self to
be able to know our self as an object. Our simply being our self is as close to knowing
our self as we will ever come. We cannot get closer than that. In fact, being our self is
the knowing of our self, but it is not the knowing of our self as an object.
To say ‘I am’, to assert that we are present, we must know that ‘I am’. Being and
knowing are, in fact, one single non-objective experience.
But we do not step outside of our self in order to know our own being. We simply are
our self. The being of our self is the knowing of our self. This being/knowing is shining
in all experience.
This experiential understanding dissolves the idea that our self is not present here and
now and that it is not known here and now. And when our desire to know or find our
self as an object is withdrawn, we discover that our own self was and is present all
along, shining quietly in the background, as it were, of all experience. As this becomes
obvious we discover that it is not just in the background but also in the foreground. It is
not just the witness but simultaneously the substance of all experience.
Completely relax the desire to find your self as an object or to change your experience
in any way. Relax into this present knowing of your own being. See that it is intimate,
familiar and loving. See clearly that it is never not with you. It is shining here in this
experience, knowing and loving its own being. It runs throughout all experience, closer
than close, intimately one with all experience but untouched by it.
As this intimate oneness, it is known as love. In its untouchableness it is known as peace
and in its fullness it is known as happiness. In its openness and willingness to give itself
to any possible shape (including the apparent veiling of its own being) it is known as
freedom, and as the substance of all things it is known as beauty.
More simply it is just known as ‘I’ or ‘this’.
WHO IS

All these questions about Consciousness and the replies given about self-enquiry and
so on, along with everything else, are all just Consciousness either knowingly or
unknowingly expressing itself. It all seems so incredibly circular.
It is only circular for the one who believes him or herself to be something other than
Consciousness, and that one is a thought-made entity. It is an imaginary inside self.
Consciousness is always in the same place, the placeless place of our own being.
Everything is made of our self, Consciousness. That is easy to check in your own
experience. Just ask yourself if you have ever experienced or could ever experience
anything outside Consciousness. Likewise, ask yourself if you know or could know
anything other than your knowing of experience.
All we know is knowing. And what is knowing made of? Only Awareness or
Consciousness, that is, only our self. And what is it that knows knowing? Only knowing!
It knows itself.
It is our simple, direct and intimate experience that all that is ever known is
Consciousness knowing and being itself, and because there is not the least trace of
separation, distance or otherness in this knowing of our own being, it is also known as
love.
All there is, is knowing, being and loving, seamlessly one, and that is our self. This
knowing, being and loving is modulated through thinking, sensing and perceiving and
appears as the diversity and multiplicity of names and forms of the body, mind and
world.
Once this seamless oneness of Consciousness is apparently divided by thought into
separate entities, objects, others and the world, then desires, fears, motives, causes,
effects, intentions, progress, achievement, failure and so on – the whole personal
endeavour – becomes very real.
However, it is only real for the separate, inside self that thought imagines, just as the
troubles of a character in a film are only real for that imaginary character. They are not
real for the screen. They are not even known by the screen. The screen knows only
itself; the characters are only real for the imaginary characters.
Likewise Consciousness never really knows the separate entities, objects, others and
world that thought imagines. It knows only itself. Consciousness is already everything it
could ever be. It is one seamless, homogenous substance that can never be depleted,
added to, changed or moved. It gains or loses nothing from the entire human adventure.
From the point of view of the person there is bondage and liberation, veiling and
revealing, knowing and not-knowing, but from the point of view of Consciousness there
is only knowing, being and loving itself.
Imagine going to sleep at night. We lie down, fall asleep, dream that we leave home,
undertake a great adventure that lasts several years and then return. Then we wake up,
only to find that we have been lying peacefully in our bed all along. It was a long,
strange, circular journey for the one who seemed to be travelling. But for the one lying
in bed, nothing ever happened.

So much of life would seem to be Consciousness knowingly or apparently un-

knowingly doing lots of things, but in these questions and responses we have
Consciousness getting very close to exposing its own unknowingness. Indeed it would
appear to be the desire of some apparent entities (that is, as Consciousness
unknowingly) to achieve that very exposure and to become fully knowing.
Yes, Consciousness takes the shape of a thought that seems to divide its own oneness
into an inside self and an outside world. It is this entity, made only of thought, that goes
on the great adventure of seeking.
The adventure of being a person, the whole human adventure, all takes place in the
mind. And what is mind made of? Consciousness.
It is the mind, in the shape of the apparently inside self, that sets off, ‘into a far-off,
country’ outside its own kingdom, away from home. It wanders around, as this
apparently inside self in the apparent world, looking for peace in situations, happiness
in objects and love in relationships. The whole adventure is created and enacted within
the mind. And while the mind is doing its thing, searching, achieving, failing, hoping,
fearing, doing, thinking, choosing and so on, Consciousness, our self, is just lying
peacefully in its bed. That is, it is just abiding in and as itself.
It is true that the mind is ultimately made of Consciousness, but it is the mind that takes
the adventure, not Consciousness. The screen does not undertake the adventure that is
enacted in the film, although the film is made only of the screen.
How does the apparently separate self know what to look for on its adventure? It knows
because peace, happiness and love are inherent in its own nature – it never forgets their
taste, although they have been veiled by the very activity of the seeking self.
Sometimes we look back with nostalgia and longing for the happiness and freedom of
childhood. But that is just an image. This happiness we long for is not far away in time.
It lies at the heart of all experience. It is the presence of happiness itself in this very
moment that shines in our experience as the longing for a happiness that seems to have
been lost. Right there in the longing for happiness is the experience of happiness itself,
shining through the veil of the separate self.
Peace, happiness and love are inherent in the simple knowing of our own being. They
are the simple knowing of our own being, and because the separate entity is ultimately
made out of our own being – albeit thinly veiled by the belief and feeling of separation
– this peace, happiness and love shine even in the apparently separate self. Our own
being of aware Presence is never truly eclipsed.
The search for peace, happiness and love is not initiated by the separate self. Even this
search is, in fact, our true self, Consciousness, shining in and through the apparently
separate self. It is the seat of God in us. Sooner or later, Consciousness withdraws the
projection of the dualising mind (that is, the projection of the apparently inside self and
the apparently outside world) back into itself, and at that moment it tastes its own
nature.
Conversations and contemplations such as these are one of the means by which our self,
Consciousness, withdraws its projection and comes to taste itself again. They are
expressed through the mind, and for this reason they can be tailored to meet the
apparently separate self, who is also made of mind. However, their true substance is not
made of mind; they are made out of the silence from which they arise, and that is why
the words sometimes touch the heart of the apparently separate self, whose true nature is
also made out of this silence.
The source of these contemplations is this silent Presence, and it is this Presence
behind, between and within the words that is recognised. And who recognises this
Presence? Only Presence can recognise itself. Not Presence ‘there’ recognising
Presence ‘here’. Just Presence, the one Presence, recognising itself in itself, by itself, as
itself, in the timeless, placeless place of its own being.
IS THIS THE FINAL UNDERSTANDING?

Nisargadatta said, ‘For you, you appear in the world. For me, the world appears in
me’ This is one of those statements that, if one gets it, it is the end of story. There is
nothing further to get.
If this is the end of the story for you, I respect that, and what is said here may not be of
interest. However, for those who understand from their own experience that the world
arises in them and yet still wonder what the reality of this world really is, then there is
more that can be said about it.
The formulation ‘The world arises in me’ is true in relation to the previous belief that
the world arises or appears at a distance from and outside of ourself (and it was
probably in that context in which Nisargadatta said it). However, it is not the final
understanding.
There is still a subtle dualism in this statement between the world that arises, albeit
within myself as Awareness, and Awareness itself, just as, relatively speaking, there is a
distinction between the objects that appear in a room and the space of the room in which
they appear. Further and deeper contemplation of experience reveals that objects, as
such, do not arise or appear within Awareness. Where would an object arise from, out
of what would it be made and where would it go when it disappeared?
The ‘world’, as we know it, is simply the belief that there is something other than
Awareness. If we look for such a world, for something that arises or appears, we do not
find it. Our experience, whether we recognise it or not, is always only of one ever-
present, homogeneous, changeless substance, which is both aware and present.
This is all we are, all we know and all we love. We, this aware Presence, never move,
change, go anywhere or do anything. We are always in our own place, this placeless
place of our self.
We simply abide as we are, and sometimes this abiding seems to be coloured by the
taste of tea, the sound of conversation, the image of the street and cars, San Francisco
airport, the grey of the London sky, the texture of sheets, the image of a dream, the
‘nothingness’ of deep sleep, an email from a friend…
In this placeless place, nothing appears or arises inside of Awareness. There are no
world, others or objects, as such. Our self, Awareness, is the sole substance of all (but
there is no ‘all’), and every apparent thing is our own self modulating itself in the form
of sights, sounds, tastes, textures, smells and so on, but always being only itself.
Having seen clearly that there is no world, object or other, as such, we can ask, what
then is our self, Awareness, this one substance? However, in order to give it a name we
have to objectify it even slightly. We make it ‘some’ thing and as opposed to ‘another’
thing. We are back in duality.
So when the idea of a separate, independent world collapses, the idea of Awareness
collapses with it. If there is no object, there cannot be a subject. If there is a subject,
there must be an object. So even in the idea of ‘oneness’, duality is implied. ‘Oneness’
is one thing too much. And then we realise how wise the early masters were. They
didn’t name this understanding ‘one’ or ‘oneness’. They only went as far as saying that it
is ‘not two’.
The mind simply cannot go further than this. We end in silence, not a silence that is an
absence of sound but one that is prior to the absence or presence of sound or, more
broadly speaking, prior to and beyond the body, mind and world. And yet, when the
body, mind and world appear, it is only the form of this silence that is truly known.

The concept of our self, ‘I’, Awareness, is the first to arise and the last to go. There is
good reason for this: it is the only ‘thing’ that is ‘real’ and therefore the only thing that
truly merits conceptualisation.
We realise that all names and words are, in fact, the names of Awareness, names that
seem to qualify it. Tea, sounds, street, cars, airport, sky…all these are the names and
forms of Awareness, just as in a film, people, houses, trees, fields and sky are simply
the names and forms that we give to the screen. They are always only the screen.
Awareness has no name but is called by all names.
So, in some ways, we are back where we started, in pure experiencing. Everything is
simple again. Questioning and contemplating the nature of reality has done its job. It has
come to its own end. We find ourself back on the streets again, so to speak, deeply at the
heart of all experience, as love, free to take the shape of all experience and yet
independent of all experience.
We find ourself as love, freedom and peace itself.
THE DISSOLUTION OF THOUGHT IN ITS OWN SUBSTANCE

How does memory work, and does it not validate the belief in the continuity of
objects and the world?
Let us imagine that last night we had dinner in a restaurant. Take any moment during
dinner and call that moment – not the memory of the moment but the actual experience –
perception A. Perception A is followed by countless other perceptions and eventually,
let us say the next morning, an image appears in the mind (let us call it image B) that is
an approximate representation of perception A. This is followed by a thought (let us call
it thought C) that connects image B to perception A. Thought C says that image B is the
memory of perception A.
However, when perception A is present, image B is non-existent, and when image B is
present, perception A is likewise non-existent. What is the connection between a current
experience and a non-existent one?
Let us go back to thought C, which imagines a connection between perception A and
image B. If we look more closely we find that when thought C is present, neither
perception A nor image B is present. Both must already have taken place for thought C
to appear.
In order to connect these two non-existent experiences together (perception A and image
B) thought C imagines a vast container in which perception A and image B, along with
innumerable other non-existent objects and events, are considered to reside. This vast
container is called ‘mind’. However, we have no experience of mind other than the
thought that thinks it.
Once the idea of mind as a vast container is considered to represent something that
actually exists, thought can have a field day! It can populate this imagined container with
all sorts of imagined experiences, such as time, space, memory, objects, people, birth,
death and causality.
Only one thing is missing from this picture that would account for our current
predicament. Having created this imaginary world of time, space, causality and so on in
thought, we then have to forget that it is all created simply with the thought that thinks it.
We have to forget that it is imagined and believe instead that it is real.
So, thought imagines that its very own creation is not its very own creation but rather
that it exists independently of its being thought about. At that moment imagination seems
to become reality and reality itself seems, as a result, to become lost or veiled.
Imagination and reality change places: imagination seems to become reality, and reality
is considered at best imagined and at worst non-existent.

This forgetting of the reality of experience is known as ignorance. It is the ignoring of

the direct, immediate and intimate nature of our experience. The ignoring of reality is
synonymous with imagining the separate, inside self and the separate, outside world,
that is, the subject and the object.
Once we have forgotten that time, space, entities, objects, causality and so on are
imagined, they seem to become very real and we, the imaginary people who appear as
the result of this forgetting, seem to reap the inevitable consequences. Having forgotten
that all this is simply a creation of thought we find ourself bemused by it, because deep
in our hearts resides the knowledge of the reality of our experience.
There is no true forgetting. The strength of our remembering, that is, the strength of
Awareness’s knowing of its own being, is never really obscured, even by the most
apparently ignorant thought. This bemusement is the experience we know as suffering or
unhappiness. It is a conflict between the deep intuition of happiness that resides at the
heart of all experience and the beliefs that thought has superimposed upon it.
Having failed to relieve this unhappiness satisfactorily through all the conventional
means that are on offer in the realms of the body, mind and world, some of us eventually
turn round and question the very construct of mind itself. What is memory, time, space,
the separate self, the world? All these questions are really the same question, and they
are all eventually answered by the same answer.
That ultimate answer is not just one more construct of thought. It is the dissolution of
thought in its own substance.
If we trace back your question all the way and refuse to be satisfied with an answer that
is yet another construct of thought, the answer is found as this living, non-objective
ever-presence into which thought dissolves and out of which it is made.

The dissolution of thought is known as understanding. Understanding does not take place
in thought, although it may be formulated by it. Hence, the transparent experience of
understanding is the identical experience to peace, happiness, love or beauty. It is the
experience of our true nature tasting itself, un-apparently-modified by the dualising
mind.
When the experience of understanding takes place at the end of a question about the
relative nature of things – such as the question ‘What is two plus two?’ – the
understanding that takes place and that is subsequently formulated as the answer – in this
case, ‘Four’ – is, like all understanding, a taste of our true nature, its taste of itself.
When the mind reappears again, ignorance is reformulated and seems again to veil our
true nature. Thus unhappiness is perpetuated.
If understanding is experienced at the end of a question about our true nature, our self
again tastes itself, that is, it tastes its own transparent nature. However, this time, when
the mind returns it has been relieved of the beliefs about our true nature, just as in the
previous example the mind was relieved of the uncertainty of the question ‘What is two
plus two?’ This dissolution of the ignorance of our true nature is the experience
commonly known as enlightenment.
The experience of enlightenment is the end of the belief in the separate self and thus
brings one chapter of our life to a close. However, it is only the beginning of true self-
realisation, which involves the dissolution of the sense of separation in our feelings –
that is, in the body – rather than simply in our beliefs.
The experience of enlightenment is the biggest trap for many people in contemporary
non-dual circles. Having discovered that there is no separate self, the still prevalent
feelings of separation are met with the partial understanding that they appear to no one.
In this way, by far the larger aspect of separation, the feeling of separation, remains
intact in most cases, and any further investigation of our experience is curtailed by the
superficial understanding that all seeking is undertaken by the non-existent separate self.
In our era, the subtlety, depth and richness of the true non-dual understanding has thus
been downgraded and adapted to a culture that is satisfied with quick fixes and
superficial formulations. However, many people who once subscribed to that partial
understanding are now beginning to realise that their search was numbed by it but not
truly ended.

Returning now to the dissolution of memory, time, space, the separate self, objects,
others, the world and so on, we may well still wonder why, if all these are simply
constructs of mind, made only of intermittent thoughts and perceptions that bear no
relation to one another, there is such consistency to appearances. After all, it is this
consistency that seems to validate our belief in all these concepts.
What appears to be consistency between objects or thoughts is, in fact, a pale reflection
at the level of the mind of the only true consistency there is: the consistency or, more
accurately, the ever-presence of our own being, Awareness. Even in the appearance of
intermittent thoughts, images, sensations and perceptions, which are not in themselves
consistent, Awareness, as it were, leaves a trace of itself, a hint of its own reality.
All experience is shining with the ever-presence of Awareness.
Apparent consistency in time or permanence in space does not belong to the realm of
thoughts or objects. It belongs to Awareness. The ever-presence of Awareness is
translated, in the language of mind, as continuity in time and permanence in space.
Time and space are the mind’s way of conceptualising the eternal, infinite nature of
reality. They are hints of the Beloved in the realm of the mind.
DOES LIFE HAVE A PURPOSE?

Does Consciousness have a purpose or plan for all this manifestation?

The idea of a purpose or plan is for thought, not for Consciousness.
For the separate, inside self that thought imagines, the ultimate purpose of life is love,
peace and happiness. That is why everyone seeks them, not realising that the apparently
inside self and its inevitable search veils the very love, peace and happiness for which
it is in search.
However, love, peace and happiness are inherent in the knowing of our own being. In
fact, they are the knowing of being. They are simply other names for our self. Love,
peace and happiness are present as the origin and substance of all appearances, so it
cannot be said that the purpose of appearances is to acquire them. They are already
present! They are already the entire substance of the thought that seeks them.
It is only a thought that rises up and imagines that Consciousness is not present, and that
therefore love, peace and happiness are not present. With this thought the seamless
intimacy of our own being seems to become two things, an inside self and an outside
world.
From that moment onwards the apparently separate self is condemned to searching in the
apparently outside world for the lost love, peace and happiness, and makes of this
search a great mission, purpose or plan. It then imagines that this purpose or plan must
be inherent in Consciousness. It is not. It is in the mind alone. The drama in the film is
for the image, not for the screen.
So, if we think we are a separate, inside self, the purpose or plan is to find love, peace
and happiness.
That search is not something the separate self does. It is what it is.
As soon as it becomes clear that we are not a separate, inside self, it is simultaneously
realised that the ultimate achievement of the apparent self’s purpose or plan is already
present prior to and during all appearances as their origin and substance. It is not
achieved as a result of the mind’s projects; it is revealed when the mind’s projects are
dissolved. In fact, it is the mind’s projects that veil the love, peace and happiness that
are being sought.
The search for love, peace and happiness veils the very love, peace and happiness that
are being sought. Searching for love, peace and happiness is like looking for darkness
with a torch.
At the same time, these projects are inevitable as long as we consider ourself to be a
separate, inside self, precisely because this apparent self is the main project!
Consciousness knows itself as the love, peace and happiness that is the source and
substance of all appearances, whilst for the apparent person, love, peace and happiness
are their destiny.
For Consciousness there is no purpose or plan. For the apparently separate self there is
a purpose or a plan – in fact, the apparent self doesn’t have a plan; it is a plan. The
apparent self is the search for happiness. Our true self, aware Presence or
Consciousness, is the happiness it is searching for.
How could happiness have a plan? It is already that for which all plans are made.
THE SEED OF SEPARATION

What about being joy, love and peace collectively? Can we all realise ourselves as
one knowing Presence, or how can humanity as a whole see itself, actually awaken to
being one, no one and many?
The experience of joy, love and peace is the experiential realisation that there is no
separate, inside self and no separate, outside objects, others or world.
It is the dualising mind that first conceptually divides the seamless intimacy of aware
Presence into two apparent things – one, the Awareness part that is considered to reside
inside the body, and two, the being or existence part that is considered to reside outside
in the world.
This separation of experience into two apparent things gives credibility to the apparent
existence of a separate subject inside the body and a separate object outside, which are
subsequently fragmented into a multiplicity of people, selves, others and the world. The
same dualising mind then seeks to alleviate the suffering that is inherent in its own
fragmentation of experience and, by so doing, simply perpetuates its own illusion and
the suffering that attends it.
This approach does not imply that nothing is done in response to a given situation in the
world. Once the mind is no longer dominated by and in service of the belief in
separation, it becomes a tool in the hands of love and intelligence.
The form in which this love and intelligence is expressed will vary greatly depending
on the particular characteristics of the body and mind through which it is expressed – in
one as an artist, in another as a social activist, in another as a mother or father looking
after a family, in another a teacher, and so on in an almost infinite variety of ways.
Whatever their particular characteristics, the activities that come from joy, love and
peace are replete with their origin and they communicate it. The scale on which they
deliver depends on the power of the body and mind and the circumstances in which they
prevail, but that is not important. However, joy, love and peace are prior to all these
activities, not their result. If we make them into a project, we create a future and we
commit ourself to an endless cycle of becoming.
It is not the separate self or humanity that sees the true self of aware Presence. It is
aware Presence that sees the apparently separate self or humanity. In fact, that is not
quite true; it is a concession to a belief in independent objects and selves. Aware
Presence sees only itself.
In order to see an apparently separate self and its counterpart, the apparently separate
world, aware Presence first has to take the shape of the mind. The apparently separate
self and the apparently outside world are made out of that mind. They are born of an
imaginary fragmentation of experience into two apparent things or entities. Only a mind
sees a mind. Only an apparent self sees an apparent self and an apparent world.
This apparent self then tries to relieve the suffering in the world, without realising that
the suffering it is trying to relieve is inherent in and created by its view of itself as a
separate inside entity, amongst many others, in an outside world.
The separate, inside self does not suffer. It is the activity of suffering. This imaginary
self cannot cure the problem because it, with all of its projects, is the problem.
However, the separate self is only a problem from its own imaginary point of view.
Without this separate self there is no world, no humanity, no others, as they are normally
conceived, to save. In fact, there is no problem. Ironically, it is this understanding that is
truly humane and compassionate, that truly helps the world.
Of course, the separate self is often offended when it hears this because its own
imaginary identity is being exposed. We may even feel frustration or anger when we
hear this. But this frustration is a gift from our true self of aware Presence to itself,
because it reveals the seed of separation. It is this seed that flourishes as all the various
forms of suffering.
Likewise, it is the dissolution of this seed of separation that flourishes as all the forms
of joy, love and peace. It is here that all conflicts, personal and otherwise, are resolved.
OFFERING EVERYTHING TO PRESENCE

You say, ‘From time to time old layers of identification with the body and mind
reappear. Those that are necessary for the functioning of everyday life continue as
and when they are needed. Those that are not functional drop away naturally. ’Would
you please speak of this a bit more?
What is normally described as enlightenment is the experiential understanding that our
self is ever-present, unlimited Awareness. This realisation may seem to come at the end
of a long process of preparation, or it may seem to come unexpectedly and unsolicited.
In either case, the patterns of the body and mind that have been rehearsed, in most cases,
over many years, do not disappear immediately but continue to appear, out of habit, for
some time.
However, they are no longer fuelled by the apparently separate, inside self that was
previously at their origin. They are simply old habits running on momentum. They are,
as it were, empty, with no real entity at their source. How long these habits take to run
down varies from case to case.
It is a common misunderstanding to think that after this so-called enlightenment
everything will be perfect, and as a result we sometimes lose heart when the old habits
appear. Enlightenment is the end of one process – the process of thinking and feeling
ourself to be a separate and limited inside self – but the beginning of another. It is the
beginning of the realignment of the body, mind and world with our new experiential
understanding.
If one has been on the path for many years, the body and mind may already be well
aligned with this understanding and, as a result, very little change will take place. For
another, who has stumbled across this without much preparation, there may be an
explosion at the level of the body and mind, with dramatic effects and experiences.
These are the ones we normally hear about because they make good stories, and in these
cases there is often a relatively long period of time during which the body and mind are
re-orchestrated, as it were, by the new experiential understanding.
It is for each of us to see whether such thoughts, feelings and activities of separation
have, at their origin, a belief in separation, or whether they are simply old habits of the
body and mind winding down. In neither case is it necessary to have an agenda with
them.
We should be happy when these residues of ignorance show up. They are our true self
showing itself those areas of the body and mind that have yet to be colonised by its
presence. There is no need to make a problem of our problems. We simply get used to
being Presence knowingly. The residues of the separate self can simply be offered to
Presence.
What does it mean to offer them to Presence? It may mean subjecting our belief in
separation, and the feelings and actions that follow from it, to the scrutiny of reason. Or
it may mean simply welcoming these uncomfortable feelings, allowing them to take their
full shape within Presence with no agenda for or against them.
In both cases, what seems from the point of view of the apparently separate self to be an
offering of the body and mind to Presence is, in fact, Presence permeating the old
residues of ignorance at the level of the body and mind with its inherent nature of peace,
freedom and happiness.
As these residues of ignorance drop away, responses to situations will arise in the
moment, out of the moment itself, unmediated by a sense of separation. Nothing
necessary for the functioning of an ordinary life is lost. All that is lost is the sense of
separation, which has acted as a sort of lens through which experience is filtered and
with which it is manipulated to serve the insatiable requirements of a non-existent entity.
No longer dulled by the sense of separation, the body and mind return to their natural
condition – open, sensitive and loving. In response to a situation they become
instruments of love and understanding in action. Left to themselves, without the need to
respond to a particular situation, they quietly get on with life, celebrating their origin at
every moment.
LOVE ONLY KNOWS ITSELF

You once responded to a question with the answer, ‘Because there is love.’ When the
essential emptiness of the true self is perceived, peace begins to pervade one’s life,
but it seems that the concept of love fails to do justice to this experience. Do you
think that love has any reality outside of the conceptual arena?
The answer ‘Because there is love’ was given to the question ‘How do we know that
Awareness is impersonal?’ In this answer the word ‘love’ is used to point towards the
experiential understanding that there is only one Awareness or, more accurately, that
there is only Awareness.
If a number of people were asked if they knew or felt that the Awareness that is seeing
this very question is unlimited and impersonal, most would answer ‘No’. However, if
those same people were asked if they felt or knew that love existed, most, if not all,
would answer ‘Yes’. In other words, few people doubt the experience of love but most
of us misinterpret it.
The mind in fact knows nothing of love, precisely because it is not present during the
experience. That is why we like it so much!
Love could be said to be the dissolution of those boundaries or borders which seem to
separate us one from another, that is, that seem to divide Awareness into subjects,
objects and parts. Love is the dissolution of the dualising mind. When the mind returns
and tries to describe this non-objective experience of love, in which it was not present
and about which it therefore knows nothing, it misinterprets the experience.
The mind returns saturated, as it were, with the taste of love out of which it has arisen. It
retains the perfume of this non-objective experience.
Not knowing where this perfume comes from, the mind manufactures a story to account
for the new and happy state in which it finds itself. Out of the seamlessness of
experience it imagines two entities, in this case a loving subject, ‘I’, and a loved object,
the other, ‘you’, which are supposedly connected together by an activity of loving.
As the shine wears off, for the mind, it seems that the experience of love is lost.
Bewildered by this apparent loss of love, the separate self goes out again in search of a
relationship that will recover the experience of love, not realising that it is its own
presence – the apparently separate self – and that of its counterpart, the separate other,
that veils the love for which it is searching.
Off, the apparently separate self goes again, out into the apparent world of objects and
others, until it encounters a face that reminds it of the beloved, at which moment the
separate self plunges again into non-existence and love tastes itself anew.
So, in answer to your question as to whether love has any reality outside the conceptual
arena, I would say that love’s only reality is outside the conceptual arena.
Our efforts to conceptualise love (such as I have done here) are feeble attempts, using
the abstract symbols of the mind, to point towards the reality of our experience, which is
intimately and directly experienced and known by everyone and yet is completely
beyond the capacity of the mind to know, grasp or understand.
The mind does not even know how to think of love, let alone how to define it. If we try
to think of love, we do not even know where to start looking. It is closer than close and
yet it lies in an unknown direction.
Love only knows itself.
PERSON, WITNESS, SUBSTANCE, PRESENCE

During any thought, sensation or perception there is only thinking, sensing or perceiving
taking place. When the thought, sensation or perception comes to an end, the mind
immediately rises up again and creates a ‘filler’ thought – the ‘I’ thought. With this
thought the apparently separate ‘I’ is created and is imagined to have been present
during the previous thought, sensation or perception, as its creator and witness.
In this way the dualising mind imagines the true and only ‘I’ of aware Presence to be a
separate thinker, feeler, chooser, lover, creator and so on – hence ‘I think’, ‘I feel’, ‘I
choose’, ‘I love’ and ‘I create’. With this belief, ‘I, aware Presence’ seems to become
‘I, the mind’. Likewise, with this filler thought the ‘I’ of aware Presence is imagined to
be a doer and seems to become ‘I, the body’.
Thus, ‘I, the separate self’ is conceived as a reality. Experience now seems to consist of
perception A, then ‘I, the separate self’, then perception B, then ‘I, the separate self’,
then perception C, then ‘I, the separate self’, and so on. Each of these ‘I, the separate
self’ thoughts is considered to be indicative of a permanent ‘I’ entity which supposedly
runs throughout every perception and remains after the perception has ceased.
When the ‘I, the separate self’ thought is seen to be simply a thought that appears from
time to time (in other words, simply another perception) and to make reference to an
entity which is, in fact, entirely non-existent, this filler ‘I’ thought loses its foundation.
The belief that it refers to something real dissolves as a result, revealing the aware
Presence that was underneath it all along.
Instead of perception, ‘I’ thought, perception, ‘I’ thought, perception, ‘I’ thought, there is
now perception, Presence, perception, Presence, perception, Presence.
As this becomes more our lived experience, the Presence that shines between
perceptions is also understood experientially to run throughout all perceptions. Aware
Presence is known to be ever-present and to sometimes ‘take the shape’ of thinking,
sensing or perceiving.
Our experience is now felt as ‘I, Presence’ taking the shape of the texture of sheets, the
morning light, the warmth of water, the taste of tea, the hum of traffic, the voices at
work, the perceptions of home, the image of a dream, the peace of deep sleep and so on,
always changing outwardly, never changing inwardly.
Is it true that whilst from the ultimate perspective there is no doer, experiencer or
world, the sense of a doer, an experiencer and a world is naturally experienced and is
not a mistake or a problem to be transcended, but rather impartially witnessed and
enjoyed?
If we know our self as the witness of the doer and the experiencer then, by definition,
we know that we are not a doer or an experiencer. We cannot legitimately say that we
feel we are both the witness and the doer at the same time.
At the moment we know our self as the witness, we know that there is no individual
doer or experiencer. There are just thoughts, sensations and perceptions arising in
Awareness. The previously imagined doer or experiencer is understood to be simply a
witnessed thought or sensation arising, along with all others, in Awareness. Conversely,
the moment we consider our self to be a doer, a thinker or an experiencer, we cease to
have the experiential understanding that we are the witness.
When we know thoughts, sensations and perceptions to be arising in our self, aware
Presence, we take our stand as the witness. When we know them to arise as our self we
take our stand as their substance. As witness we are transcendent, as substance,
immanent. As witness we take our stand as no-thing; this is the position of wisdom. As
substance we take our stand as everything; this is the position of love.
These are the two modes of experience: as witness we are the knowing element in all
experience, as substance we are the being element in all experience. That is, we
simultaneously know the world and are the world. The conjunction of these two reveals
the third element of experience, known as enjoyment in relation to the world and as
friendship in relation to others – in other words, happiness and love.
So, we could say that we first seem to know our self as a doer – a body – and an
enjoyer – a mind –and as this apparent body and mind we seem to know a world. Upon
investigation we find that we are not a body or a mind that knows a world but rather that
we are the witness of the body, mind and world.
The ‘I’ that was considered to be a body and mind is now realised to be ‘I, the
witnessing presence of Awareness’. It is not that the ‘I’ of the body and mind has
dissolved or disappeared, but rather that it is revealed to be and to have always been
the witnessing presence of Awareness and never a body or mind. It is relieved of a
conceptual limitation.
However, this witnessing ‘I’ still seems to be subtly distinct or separate from the
witnessed body, mind and world. Upon closer investigation, we find that ‘I’ is not just
the witness but also, simultaneously, the substance out of which the body, mind and
world are made. Again, it is not that the witnessing ‘I’ dissolves or disappears but
rather that it is relieved of a subtle superimposition by which it was seemingly limited
and located.
As we go more deeply into experience we find that ‘I’ as the substance of all seeming
things still subtly validates the idea of ‘things’ in their own right, which upon
investigation are found to be non-existent. At this stage the idea of ‘I’ as substance is
relieved of its last trace of superimposition and remains standing in and as itself, naked
and alone.
What for the mind seems to be a progression from person to witness to substance to
aware Presence is, for Presence itself, no progression at all. Veiling and unveiling are
for the mind. Presence is always only itself.
In ignorance Presence seems to come and go in the world. In wisdom the world seems
to come and go in Presence. In love, all is consumed in Presence, leaving only pure love
itself without any knowledge of objects, bodies, minds, others, selves, entities or things,
just pure, seamless, nameless, indivisible intimacy.
WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT ANYTHING IS

Is it possible to know what the body, an object or the world really is, independent of
the mind?
We have arrived at the clear experiential understanding that all that is known of the
apparent body, object or world is sensing and perceiving, and that our self, Awareness,
is the substance of all sensing and perceiving. Thinking adds a label to this sensing and
perceiving, and with that addition the apparent object, other or world is created.
Such an object is conceived as a thing in its own right. Sensing and perceiving supply
its form, thinking its name. Things, objects, bodies and the world, as they are normally
conceived to be, are simply concepts that we superimpose upon the reality of
experience. They are never experienced as such. And not only have a body, object or
world, as such, never been experienced independently of sensing and perceiving, but
they never could be.
This brings us to a simple but extraordinary conclusion: the ultimate reality of all things,
indeed reality itself, is not only unknown by the mind but, more importantly,
unknowable. We truly do not know what anything is. In fact, we do not even know if
there are such ‘things’ in the first place to be known.
The mind can only know its own creations. If it imagines that there is something with
real and independent existence outside of itself, then that image is simply one more of
its own creations. So if the mind looks for something outside itself, it only finds more of
itself. And if it turns round, as it were, to try to look within itself for its own essence, it
dissolves. It dies like a moth in a flame.
Once this is clearly seen, the mind is relieved of an immense burden – the burden of
knowing. Such a mind is silent and free. It knows nothing but can express everything. It
has no fixed positions but can take any position relative to a given situation. The mind
does not and cannot know reality and yet, at the same time, is its expression.
As William Blake said, ‘All things possible to be believed are an image of truth.’
It is this freedom and creativity that lie at the heart of all true artistic expression. The
mind cannot touch reality and yet it is saturated in it.
It is for this reason that Blake also said, ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of
time.’
For this reason, there is no end to an artist’s work. If reality were in the mind, there
would be an end of art, an end of creativity. There would be something to find,
somewhere at which to arrive, the final statement.
But there is not. The ‘productions of time’ flow timelessly from eternity, the ever-
present now, simultaneously exploring, celebrating and sharing their own substance, a
dance of love and beauty that has no purpose other than celebrating itself. All true art is
for art’s sake alone. It has no other purpose or destination.
So, does this mean that reality is unknown or unknowable? No! If that were so,
whatever is known or experienced in this and every situation would be something other
than reality. It simply means that the conceptualising mind has no access to reality. But
reality has access to itself. Reality knows itself.
Reality is the knowing of itself. But it is not a knowing in relationship; it is a knowing in
identity. Love is the name that is given to this ‘knowing in identity’.
There is nothing other than reality’s knowing of itself. There is nothing other than love.
It is also known as simply ‘this’ and ‘I’.
THERE IS ONLY PURE INTIMACY

When do objects become solid? I think you will say, ‘When the
perceivingConsciousness contracts and becomes a thinking subject, a separate I-
entity’. In that case, there is a thinking subject (that which sees) separate from the
object (that which is seen) but not yet solid objects.
I would not say, ‘When the perceiving Consciousness contracts and becomes a thinking
subject, a separate I-entity’, because Consciousness never contracts or expands. Nor
indeed do objects ever become solid.
Rather, I would say that objects seem to become real in themselves, that is, become
solid, when dualising thought arises and exclusively identifies Consciousness with a
fragment, with a body, and seems as a result to contract Consciousness into a personal,
limited ‘I’.
You go on to say, ‘In that case there is a thinking subject (that which sees) separate from
the object (that which is seen) but not yet solid objects’. However, the so-called
physical objects that seem to result from this separation of experience into a perceiving
subject and a perceived object are, by definition, seemingly solid. It is the apparent
objectivity that is created by this act of imagination that confers apparent solidity,
otherness, separateness and ‘not-me-ness’ upon objects.
Objects are never really solid, precisely because, in reality, there are no objects. Touch
any object now, this book or screen, for instance. A new sensation appears. Is that
sensation solid? No! There is only the knowing of the sensation, and all knowing is
made of Consciousness. How solid is Consciousness?
The apparent objectivity and solidity of the world, others and objects is the natural
counterpart of the apparent subjectivity of the personal ‘I’.
The apparently separate subject and the apparently separate object always appear and
dissolve together. It is their appearance, that is, the appearance of dualising thought,
which seems to obscure or veil Consciousness, resulting in the apparent reality of
objectivity and solidity.
Likewise, it is the dissolution of dualising thought that restores the experience of objects
to that which they truly are, that is, modulations of our own being, Consciousness.
Consciousness is simply the knowing of being, so this apparent veiling of
Consciousness could be said to be the knowing of something apparently other than our
self, the knowing of something other than being.
This ‘something’ apparently other than being is what is known as the separate ‘I’ and the
separate object, other or world. Objects seem to become real and solid at the moment
dualising thought seems to veil the knowing of being. Therefore, ‘objectness’ and
‘solidity’ are simply ideas that are superimposed by thought onto the reality of our
experience.

Let us explore this experientially. How do the idea and apparent feeling of objectness
and solidity arise?
There is Consciousness, transparent, formless, full only of the knowing of itself – pure
knowing and being. This Consciousness, having no form, has the capacity to appear as
all forms. Consciousness gives itself to all apparent forms but loses itself to none of
them.
In order to appear as form, Consciousness takes the shape of what we call mind, in the
broadest sense of the word. That is, Consciousness takes the shape of sensing,
perceiving and thinking. This is meant in the same sense as it could be said that a screen
takes the shape of the image that appears on it, such as a landscape. The screen doesn’t
actually become anything other than itself, such as a landscape, but only seems to.
Now imagine Consciousness taking the shape of sensing and perceiving, just as the
ocean takes the shape of a current flowing within it, water within water. Sensing and
perceiving are made only of Consciousness, and it is Consciousness that knows itself as
such. Sensing and perceiving could be said to be modulations of our own being,
modulations of Consciousness.
For our self, that is, for Consciousness, being ‘sensing and perceiving’ and knowing
‘sensing and perceiving’ is one single experience, not two.
At this stage the entire experience of sensing/perceiving is known to be made of one
single substance, our self, Consciousness. That is, Consciousness knows itself as
sensing/perceiving. ‘Mind’ and ‘matter’ are not yet experiences. Consciousness simply
knows itself in and as the intimacy of sensing/perceiving.
Consciousness is too intimately, utterly one with itself as sensing/perceiving to separate
itself out and know itself as ‘something’, as a sensation or a perception, that is, as an
object. Consciousness is both the existence of sensing/perceiving and the knowing of it.
At a certain point Consciousness takes the shape of thinking, which is, as it were,
another current within the ocean, another modulation of Consciousness within
Consciousness. And because thinking is made only of Consciousness it has the ability to
assume the form of an infinite variety of thoughts. One such thought is that which
identifies Consciousness, which in reality pervades all sensing/perceiving, with just
one little part of it, called ‘the body’.
This dualising thought splits the seamless intimacy of sensing/perceiving into two parts:
a ‘body’ part and a ‘not-the-body’ part. With this thought, Consciousness, which in
reality is the substance of all of sensing/perceiving equally, is imagined to pervade only
the body part and not the ‘not-the-body’ part. The ‘I’ of Consciousness, which once
knew itself as the substance of all sensing/perceiving, now seems to know itself as only
the body.
In reality Consciousness always only knows itself. It never truly knows anything other
than itself. So, to effect the apparent veiling of itself it first has to take the shape of the
dualising mind. The dualising mind, however, is made only of Consciousness and
therefore does not truly veil Consciousness, any more than the arising of an image on the
screen veils the screen.
With the dualising thought, Consciousness is identified with the body. However, this
identification is apparent only. It never actually happens; it is only believed to have
happened. The identification is for thought, not for Consciousness. This belief is the
‘separate I-entity’, or the ‘ego’, and its corollary, the ‘world’. It is the ‘forgetting of
Presence’.

With this thought we have moved from a position in which Consciousness is known and
felt to be the substance of all experience equally to a position in which it is believed
and felt to be the substance of only the body. So, if Consciousness is believed and felt to
be the substance of the body – in other words, if ‘I’ is believed and felt to be the body –
what is the ‘not-the-body’ made of? That is, what are objects, others and the world
made of?
As a corollary to the belief that Consciousness is located in and as the body, a new
belief is created to account for everything that is now considered to be other than
Consciousness. This new entity is called the ‘world’ and is believed to be ‘everything I
am not’. The ‘separate I-entity’ and the ‘world’ are two aspects of the same idea – the
belief that Consciousness is veiled or not present.
This imagined world must be made of something. Thought has already split our
experience in two and assigned Consciousness to the body, so the world must be made
of something other than Consciousness. This ‘something other than Consciousness’ is
what we call ‘matter’, and it is considered to be solid, inert and dense – the opposite of
everything we consider Consciousness to be.
As a result, when we touch a chair we feel that ‘I’ (this alive being inside the body) is
touching the chair (that dead, inert thing outside the body). The chair is experienced as
being solid, dense, inert, while in fact the experience of ‘the chair’ is the experience of
one new sensation/perception. This sensation/perception is made only of
sensing/perceiving and, as we have seen, sensing/perceiving is made only of
Consciousness. It is a modulation of Consciousness.
There is nothing solid, dense or inert about sensing/perceiving. Sensing/perceiving is
vibrant and alive – alive with the knowingness and beingness of Consciousness. It is the
light of Consciousness that makes the experience knowable. In fact, there is no
substance to the experience of the chair other than the light of Consciousness. It is the
aliveness of Consciousness that makes the experience living, vibrant, intimate, real.
If we go deeply into the experience of sensing/perceiving that we call ‘the chair’, we
find nothing dense, solid or inert there. Density, solidity and inertia are simply concepts
superimposed onto the reality of our experience by the dualising mind. These concepts
dull the living, sensitive, vibrating, intimate quality of all experience – which is
naturally infused with enjoyment, enthusiasm and love – and reduce it to matter, objects
and others.
Matter and solidity are only a seeming reality for thought. They are not a reality for
Consciousness. For Consciousness, which means for our self, Consciousness itself is
the reality of all experience.

But when I touch a chair I feel a chair, and even if it is not named, it is different from
my hand. So that part is not completely clear to me.
Without the naming, there is no difference between the hand and the chair – they are one
experience. Even with the naming, they are still one, only they are not known as such.
Naming seems to separate them into two distinct objects.
Without naming there is no ‘hand’ or ‘chair’ in the first place that could be either the
same as or different from one another. There is only sensing/perceiving. In fact, without
naming there isn’t even sensing/perceiving; there is simply the utterly intimate,
unnameable reality of experiencing.
Does the hand know that it is a hand? Does the chair know that it is a chair? No! It is
thinking/naming that says so. In the absence of thinking, where are the hand and the
chair? They are nowhere to be found.
Even with thinking/naming, the hand and the chair, as such, are nowhere to be found in
actual experience. They are not present, although they are considered to be so. It is only
thinking that makes them seem to be present in their own right.
In the absence of thinking their seeming presence belongs to Consciousness alone. Even
when thinking is present, their seeming presence belongs only to Consciousness.
Consciousness is all that is ever truly present, and all seeming things borrow their
apparent existence from it. In fact, it is not that Consciousness is present but rather that
Consciousness is Presence itself.
Only Consciousness is ever truly present, knowing and being itself eternally, taking the
shape of sensing, perceiving and thinking but never being or becoming anything other
than itself. The presence of all seeming things properly belongs to Consciousness alone.

Place your hand on the chair and see that one new sensation/perception appears. In fact,
it is not even a sensation/perception. It is sensing/perceiving, a modulation of
Consciousness, water within water.
See clearly that both the apparent hand and the apparent chair are experienced in this
one sensation/perception. It is only one sensation/perception, so is it hand or chair? As
hand it is ‘me’, as chair it is ‘not me’. But it cannot be ‘me’ and ‘not me’ simultaneously.
See clearly that ‘hand’ and ‘chair’, ‘me’ and ‘not me’ are labels superimposed by
thinking onto the reality of our experience. The experience itself, sensing/perceiving,
comes with no label attached. In fact, in the absence of thinking, it is not even
sensing/perceiving. It is simply experiencing.
Even to call it ‘experiencing’ is too much; to do so we first have to step back, as it
were, and see it, name it. But experience is too close, too immediate, too intimate to be
seen or named. It is already and only the knowing and being of itself. There is no time
present in experience itself in which to step back and look from a distance, and nowhere
we could step back to, from where we might look.
The fish does not know when it is in the water; it only knows when it is out of the water.
In fact, fish don’t have a word for water!
There is just raw, seamless, indivisible, ever-present experiencing. There is only pure
intimacy.
THE EVER-PRESENT REALITY OF EXISTENCE

What appears or is born when the body appears, and what dies or disappears when
the body dies?
In order to answer this question we first have to know what the body is when it is alive.
The only experience we have of the body is the current one, so this very experience is
the only place from which we can answer this question.
The current experience of the body is a sensation/perception. This sensation/perception
is made only of sensing/perceiving, and sensing/perceiving is a colouring of Awareness.
There is no substance present in the experience of the sensation/perception that we call
the body other than the presence of Awareness. When the body is apparently present,
Awareness knows and is that appearance simultaneously. The substance, reality and
aliveness of the body belong to Awareness alone, just as the substance and reality of an
image belong to the screen.
However, we have no experience of the appearance of Awareness, therefore
Awareness cannot be said to be an appearance. So what is it that appears? It must be
something that is not Awareness. But how and what would such a thing be?
It is sometimes said that things appear in Awareness like objects appear in a room, that
is, that they seem to come from outside and enter. However, there is no ‘outside’ of
Awareness. Nor is there any stuff outside of Awareness that such a thing could be made
of.
Nothing comes from outside Awareness and enters it, nor is there any substance ‘within’
Awareness out of which an object could be made, other than Awareness itself.
Awareness is already fully present. No part of Awareness comes or goes when an object
appears – the totality of Awareness is ever-present. Therefore, nothing new appears
when an object appears – the substance of all apparent objects is ever-present.
Even ‘appearance and disappearance’ is an idea that is superimposed upon the reality of
our experience. The substance of all seeming things is the substance out of which this
current appearance, including the appearance of the body, is made. That substance does
not come and go. Appearance or birth and disappearance or death are concepts, never
experiences.
How do we know that something has disappeared? Where is that ‘disappeared
something’ now? What became of the substance out of which that ‘disappeared
something’ was made? Where did it go? It must have gone somewhere. Something
cannot become nothing.
And when something appears, from where did the substance out of which its current
appearance is made come from? The appearing object was non-existent before it
appeared, but how could something appear out of non-existence? Out of what would it
be made?
Have we ever experienced or could we ever experience this ‘non-existence’ out of
which things are presumed to come into being and into which they are presumed to
disappear?
It is only memory, which is itself simply the current thought, that imagines that something
has disappeared, that imagines a past object that was present and is not now. And it is
only thought that imagines an object appearing from somewhere. Where could that
object reside outside of the thought that thinks it? It is nowhere to be found.
The past is made of memory, the future of imagination. Neither has any existence outside
the thought that thinks it. And that thought is itself the shape that our own timeless, aware
Presence takes in the eternal now – the ever-present reality of what alone is.
The past and the future, appearance and disappearance, birth and death, are not. That
which is known in every experience, which is the totality of the experience, is ever-
present. The substance of all seeming things eternally is.
Our own being, aware Presence, lends its reality to all seeming things.
To love an apparent other is simply to recognise their ever-present reality. To be in love
is to abide as this ever-present, aware Presence. All that is ever loved is the reality of
experience, which is all there is to experience, and that reality is the only one present
there to know, be and love itself, eternally.
Love knows nothing other than its own ever-presence.
Nothing comes and goes. In fact, ‘nothing’ and ‘something’ are not. In the timeless,
placeless now-here-ness between these apparent two lies Presence. Only appearances
appear to come and go. Their reality is ever-present.
That which truly is, eternally and alone is.
ADDICTION AND NON-DUALITY

For a while now I have had some trouble reconciling some of my behaviour with my
understanding of the non-dual teaching. The fruits of this path have definitely been
self-evident in ways that I cannot describe. However, in a very honest and worldly
sense, I have also been struggling with an addiction to lust and pornography.
I obviously feel very conflicted about this. It seems to me that this addictive, lustful
behaviour is certainly not in alignment with the truth that non-duality points to.
However, when the impulse arises to watch pornography, my mind creates a
convincing dialogue that says, ‘There is no doer. This is a spontaneous occurrence.
Don’t resist this. All is meaningless’, and so on.
I then act on the impulse, and afterwards the mind rationalises the behaviour with
more of this pseudo-logic, falsely claiming that it never left Awareness. This is, of
course, coupled with all sorts of guilt, inadequacy and other afflictive emotions.
Common sense tells me that something is amiss.
I have heard many stories of all sorts of so-called sages, holy men and enlightened
gurus who rationalise inappropriate sexual behaviour under a veneer of spiritual
truth. How dowe, as spiritual seekers, avoid this tragic pitfall, especially when we
have a deep understanding that this is a path of acceptance and not avoidance?
Your honesty and clarity already point to the freedom in yourself that you seek.
Addiction of any sort, be it to inappropriate sexual behaviour, alcohol, drugs, smoking
or any milder form of behaviour, almost always has its origin in the belief and, more
importantly, the feeling of being a separate, limited, located self.
The most common form in which this belief and feeling of separation manifests is the
subtle or not-so-subtle rejection of the current situation, that is, the ‘I don’t like what is
going on’ and the ‘I want something other than what is going on’.
These two attitudes of resistance and seeking, traditionally referred to as fear and
desire, are the two faces of the apparently separate self: the resistance to what is and the
search for happiness. The ‘apparent separate entity’, the ‘resistance to what is’ and the
‘search for happiness’ through various objects, substances or experiences are all
synonymous.
These three states are, in fact, one and the same and could also be called ignorance, or
the ignoring of the true nature of experience. Therefore, the apparently separate entity,
the resistance to what is and the search for happiness are incompatible with the
experiential understanding of the non-dual nature of experience.
You have seen that clearly, and it is that seeing which enables you to avoid the pitfall of
pseudo-non-duality that you rightly diagnose.

So let us go to the origin of this resistance to what is, because if we start anywhere else,
for instance, if we were to start with a secondary cause, we would not be going to the
root of the problem. Sooner or later our search would reappear, often in a more virulent
form. The term ‘addiction’ is used precisely to describe this more virulent form of the
search, which has become chronic and destructive.
The origin of the resistance to what is, is the belief that our essential being, Awareness,
is limited to and located within a body. This imaginary identification of our self with an
object, the body, creates the apparently separate self. The real ‘I’ of Awareness seems,
as a result, to become the limited ‘I’ of the imaginary self. That is, we think and feel that
we are a body.
This apparently separate self, being made out of an intermittent object is, by definition,
unstable, always threatened with change, decay and disappearance – hence the fear of
disappearance that resides at its heart and its natural corollary, seeking.
The fear comes from the feeling that when this intermittent sensation (the form in which
the body is appearing in this moment) disappears, ‘I’ will disappear with it. And the
desire or seeking comes from the apparent need to substantiate this fleeting entity we
believe and feel our self to be, in order to perpetuate its apparent existence.
To begin with, this fear and seeking manifest in innocuous forms of behaviour, the most
common of which is unnecessary thinking, the almost constant mental chatter or
commentary that most of us are familiar with. This running commentary is the simplest
form of the resistance to what is. It is the repetitive background chatter that ensures that
attention is almost always diverted away from the immediacy, intimacy and simplicity
of what is. This is the primal addiction.
What is, is deemed too boring, plain and uneventful to be worthy of attention, and
thinking provides an alternative dream world into which to escape from the dullness or
discomfort of the moment.
One honest look at our thinking will show that the majority of it serves no practical,
intelligent or creative purpose but is simply a sort of filler. The vast majority of our
thoughts about the past and future serve only to legitimise and perpetuate the imaginary
self that resides at their heart.
However, precisely because this type of thinking is deemed innocuous (in the sense that
it has no harmful effect on the body or on society) it passes, for the most part, unnoticed
and is indeed encouraged by our culture in general. It is the most common and effective
form of addiction, in which almost everyone is engaged, for the most part unknowingly.
Therein lies its efficiency in keeping the sense of separation alive; it is the perfect
refuge for the apparently separate self.
As we grow up, this subtle thinking is no longer sufficient to keep the anxiety, unease
and discomfort of the sense of separation at bay, and we begin to turn to stronger forms
of avoidance. These are the common forms of addiction with which we are familiar:
excessive working, eating or activity, or addiction to alcohol, smoking, drugs,
pornography and so on. All these forms of addiction are simply strategies of avoidance
of what is, avoidance of ‘this’, avoidance of ‘now’. They are the familiar refuges of the
sense of being a separate self.
Society draws a line, based on whether the addictive activity in question is of
immediate danger to itself, as to the legitimacy of each of these activities, thereby
condoning some and condemning others. But they are all simply strategies of avoidance
and denial. In fact, each of them is a variation of the root avoidance: incessant thinking
that revolves around the separate ‘I’ thought.
If we go honestly, as you have done, to our experience, we will always find this thinking
and its deeper counterpart in our feelings at the level of the body, underneath or behind
all subsequent forms of addiction. It all begins with ‘I, the body’. That is the root of all
suffering, which our addictions seek to alleviate.
If society condemns one form of addiction more than another, for whatever reason, we
may be persuaded to change from one addiction to another, but in our hearts this fire of
discomfort, avoidance and rejection, and its inevitable counterpart in the search for
happiness (which is just another name for addiction) will continue. We will not truly
rest until we have gone to the root of the matter.

To go to the root of the matter means to go to the source of the apparently separate ‘I’ –
not just the belief in the separate ‘I’ but, more importantly, the feeling of such. It is only
when the whole mechanism of the apparently separate self has been seen clearly in all
its subtlety that we are free of it – that ‘I, Awareness’ stands knowingly in and as itself,
un-apparently-veiled by the belief and feeling of separation.
It is not enough, as you have discovered, to lay a veneer of, ‘Oh well, everything is
equally an expression of Awareness and therefore nothing matters’ over our beliefs and
feelings. This kind of superficial thinking is one of the safer refuges for the apparently
separate self. The sense of separation is a past master at appropriating anything for its
own purposes of self-validation and justification, and superficial spirituality is one of
its less easily detected forms; hence the new religion of non-duality. However, that is
not your case.
In your case you have seen clearly and honestly that addiction, in this case to
pornography, is a symptom of a deeper and subtler malaise, that of the separate self. You
have seen that the mind’s attempts to justify this behaviour with convincing and
seemingly watertight non-dual arguments are not expressions of true understanding, but
rather the mind’s attempts to manipulate and appropriate the non-dual teaching to
validate its own belief systems. This is one of the main identities of the spiritual ego in
our era.
In this respect, your analysis of the pseudo-logic of the mind and your observation of the
process of impulse, action, guilt and justification are spot on. So, what to do? Go to the
heart of the matter: the apparently separate self or the apparent veiling of Awareness.
They are the same thing.
Explore this first at the level of the mind, that is, the beliefs that seem to validate the
existence of a separate self. Explore your experience and come to your own conclusion.
See that there is absolutely no experiential evidence for such a belief. This conviction
will initiate a much deeper exploration of the sense of separation at the level of
feelings, which are the true residence of the apparent self.
Without this deeper exploration non-duality remains, in most cases, a belief. As a result,
the peace and happiness that are inherent in the true experiential understanding of non-
duality will remain elusive, and further bouts of seeking will be inevitable.
The good news about addiction to porn, in contrast to alcohol, tobacco and drugs, is that
it operates mainly at the level of thoughts and feelings and does not have a lasting effect
on the body. In the case of drinking, smoking and drugs, such effects are often
irreparable or at least last long after the impulse to indulge them has been dissolved.

I would also suggest one simple practical approach: every time you feel the impulse to
watch porn, just pause. Even if, to begin with, it is only for half a minute, put a little
space between yourself and the fulfilment of the impulse. As time goes on, this period of
time can be extended until you find yourself always as this space.
Don’t expect this space to be peaceful to begin with; it probably won’t be! Most likely,
the impulse (which is, in fact, the bare face of the separate self, the separate ‘I’ in its
raw form), on finding that it is no longer relieved or fulfilled, will probably display
itself in full force. It will rebel.
Be attentive not only to the thoughts that will try to persuade you that your impulses are
perfectly OK, that you will only do it one more time, that it is all an expression of
Awareness, that there is nobody there doing it, and so on, but more importantly to all the
uncomfortable feelings in the body that rise up, demanding to be acted upon and
relieved.
See that the thoughts all revolve around a separate self that is, when sought, found to be
non-existent. It is necessary in most cases to carry out this investigation at a rational
level thoroughly in order to come to this conviction. If the conviction has not been
reached, the apparently separate ‘I’ will still be very much alive in your thoughts and
you are unlikely to have the resolve to explore your feelings fully.
Relieved of the thoughts which seem to justify the existence of a separate entity, these
feelings are exposed for what they are: raw bodily sensations, which are in fact neutral.
They only acquire their apparent negativity (and hence their need to be avoided through
addictive behaviour) when coupled with the belief in a separate self and its attendant
story. Divested of this belief in separation and its ‘me’ story, these innocuous bodily
sensations lose their power over us, that is, the power to make us think, feel or act on
their behalf.
Being clearly seen is the one thing the apparent self and its entourage of strategic
activity cannot stand. There may and probably will be tremendous resistance, both in
your thoughts and in your body, to this gentle, non-interventional but firm approach. But
once the mechanism of the separate self, at the levels of both the mind and the body, has
been truly seen through, its foundation has been removed. It is only a matter of time
before the patterns of behaviour that depended upon its apparent existence for their
survival diminish and disappear.
In the end it is not the exploration that facilitates the peace and understanding, but rather
the peace and understanding that allow the investigation to unfold. Slowly, in most
cases, the exploration absorbs the apparently separate self, and all its patterns of
thinking, feeling and acting, back into itself.

As we sit allowing these thoughts and, more importantly, uncomfortable feelings to

arise, it is important not to have any subtle agenda with them, not to do this in order to
get rid of them. That would be more of the same.
Just allow the full panoply of thoughts and feelings to display themselves in your loving
and indifferent Presence. In time their ferocity will die down, revealing subtler and
subtler layers of thinking and feeling on behalf of a separate entity, until we come to the
almost innocuous stream of background thinking.
This is the sense of separation, the ego, in its apparently mildest and least easily
detectable form. Be very sensitive to this. Be sensitive to the avoidance of what is, in its
subtlest form. It is the sweet, furry baby animal that grows into a monster!
As time goes on we become more and more sensitive and we see how much of our
thinking and feeling, as well as our activities, are generated for the sole purpose of
avoiding what is, of avoiding the ‘this’ and the ‘now’.
It is this open, non-judging, non-avoiding allowing of all things which, in time, restores
the ‘I’ to its proper place in the seat of Awareness. As a natural corollary to abiding in
and as our true self, this allowing gently realigns our thoughts, feelings and activities
with the peace and happiness that are inherent in our self.
NOBODY HAS, OWNS OR CHOOSES ANYTHING

While allowing the body, mind and world to be as they are, different thoughts arise,
some not so savoury that might be better left not acted upon.Once again the quandary
of will and volition plagues me. You have said that once one begins to abide
knowingly as Presence, responses to situations will flow naturally from there, with no
sense of there being a personal ‘responder’. Some thoughts will engage the body,
others not. This is obviously not an act of will. Is it akin to a stream flowing into an
obstruction and naturally rerouting itself? Is this yet another area where we once
believed that the separate entity had control but in reality it has none?
Yes, I like your analogy of a stream flowing into an obstruction. However, it is not just
that the stream is altered by the obstruction. The obstruction is also altered by the
stream. But this is only true if we consider the stream and the obstruction to be separate.
They are, in fact, one indivisible landscape, only made of separate parts from the point
of view of one of the imagined parts. From the point of view of the landscape itself,
there is always only one landscape, simultaneously acting upon itself and being acted
upon by itself.
Our seemingly objective experience is a single indivisible whole, made only of
thinking, imagining, sensing and perceiving. Our thoughts, feelings and actions are only
our own from the point of view of the imagined self that thinking considers us to be. In
reality, our thoughts, feelings and actions are inseparable from the indivisible whole. In
our actual experience there are no separate parts, entities or objects.
If we admit provisionally the existence of objective reality, it is one single whole. In
order to consider it to be made of parts, all acting upon one another of their own free
will, we first have to imagine our self to be one such part. Objects, entities and parts
only seem to exist, as such, from the point of view of the imaginary entity that thinking
considers us to be. That entity is simply the apparent forgetting or ignoring of
Awareness. But Awareness never truly forgets itself; it is only seemingly forgotten from
the point of view of thinking.
So what are the practical implications of this understanding in life? See that your own
thoughts and feelings are an inseparable ‘part’ of the totality at every moment. Nobody
has, owns or chooses these responses. They simply arise along with everything else.
There is no having, owning or choosing entity there.
Your own thoughts and feelings, along with the one who seems to have, own or choose
these responses, are just brushstrokes in the seamless painting of experience. The
painting is always one. It is made of brushstrokes only from the point of view of a
brushstroke. For the canvas it is one.
Likewise, experience is ever-present and indivisible. Division first has to be imagined
before objects, entities, selves, others and the world can seem real in their own right.
As it becomes clear that there is no separate individual doer, chooser or decider, so the
thoughts and feelings that revolve around this apparent entity, and the attendant habits of
behaving and relating, will appear less and less.
More and more, the thoughts, feelings, actions and relationships that appear will be in
line with our understanding. They will express love and intelligence rather than the
neuroses and anxiety of an apparently separate entity. There may well be a period
during which the old habits of thinking, feeling, acting and relating on behalf of a
separate entity continue to appear after the belief in such an entity has dissolved. This
could be said to be the transition from a moment of clear seeing, or several such
moments, to more stably embodying the implications of this understanding in all realms
of experience. In such a case these thoughts, feelings and actions are not a sign of
ignorance but simply the residue of ignorance at the level of the mind and body, slowly
winding down.
So the answer to your question, ‘Is this yet another area where we once believed that the
separate entity had control but in reality it has none?’ is ‘Yes’. However, it is not that the
separate entity once seemed to have control and is now realised to have no control at
all, but rather that the separate entity is utterly non-existent. It is simply imagined with
the thought that exclusively identifies our self, Awareness, with a body.
Once this is clearly seen, there is no longer any question as to whether or not that non-
existent entity has control, choice or free will of its own.
EXPERIENCE’S EXPERIENCE OF ITSELF

Does Consciousness require a body/mind apparatus in order to become a

knower/perceiver of the world?
Consciousness does not have or require a body/mind, nor does it experience a world
through a body/mind.
It is only when thinking artificially and seemingly divides the seamless experience of
the body/mind/world into the body/mind and the world that Consciousness, which in
fact pervades all experience equally, seems to pervade only the body/mind. As a result
of this imaginary separation, Consciousness seems to become the limited observer,
located inside the body/mind, looking out through the senses at the world.
The body/mind does not experience the world; rather, Consciousness experiences the
body/mind/world. The body/mind/world arises as one single, indivisible experience.
That is, a single sensation/thought/perception appears in Consciousness, and thinking
alone conceptualises and abstracts a separate ‘body’, ‘mind’ and ‘world’ from the raw
data of this one seamless experience.
Even the slightly more refined concept of a single appearance, the body/mind/world (or
sensation/thought/perception) is still a concept, trying to evoke the taste of experience
as it is but referring to something that is never actually experienced as such. However, it
is a valid provisional statement because it relieves us of the belief that Consciousness is
located inside the body, looking out at the world. It is step in the right direction, truer
than the previous formulation, which will in time be found to be simply another, subtler
conceptual superimposition upon experience itself.
As we look closer we do not find sensations, thoughts and perceptions, or even a single
sensation/thought/perception. That is, we do not find any objects in actual experience.
We could say, again provisionally, that we find sensing, thinking and perceiving or,
more accurately, sensing/thinking/perceiving. What we previously conceived of as a
single, multidimensional, physical object – the body/mind/world – is now conceived of
as a single, multidimensional, subtle object – sensing/thinking/perceiving.
As we go further, that is, as we look with more simplicity and honesty at experience,
even the concept of sensing/thinking/perceiving falls away and we could say that there
is just experiencing, made only of itself.
And what is it that knows or experiences experiencing? Experiencing! There is nothing
outside of experiencing with which it could be known. It alone knows itself alone.
However, it doesn’t know itself in the way that dualising thinking normally conceives of
knowing, that is, in subject–object relationship. For experiencing, knowing itself is
simply being itself. For experiencing, to know and to be are one.

Now let us go deeply into experiencing. Does it or can it stand back from itself in order
to know ‘something’? No! Experiencing cannot stand back from itself or outside itself to
know itself as an object at a distance. There is nowhere and nothing outside itself. Only
an imagined entity could imagine that it stands back from or out of experience.
Does experiencing, from its own point of view, take place at a certain place? No, all
apparent places would be made only of experiencing. Only an imagined entity, arising
within experiencing but imagining itself to be outside or separate from experiencing,
could imagine a place or location where experience might take place.
Does experiencing have any knowledge of itself taking place at a certain time? No, all
apparent times would be made only of experiencing. Again, only thinking, which
imagines an apparent entity that is apart from experiencing, could conceive of something
other than the ever-present now in which experience seemingly takes place. Experience
is too intimately full of itself to know itself as ‘something’, to know itself in
relationship.
Does experiencing have any experience of being made of separate parts, entities,
objects or things? No, all of these would only be made of experiencing. Only from the
imaginary point of view of a part, entity, object or thing could such a part, entity, object
or thing exist. And only from the imaginary point of view of one of those parts could one
of those parts be the knower or the centre of experience.
‘Parts’, ‘entities’, ‘objects’ and ‘things’ are names that are superimposed by thinking
upon experiencing itself and believed (from the point of view of thinking alone) to refer
to something that is actually experienced. From the point of view of experience they are
non-existent. Experiencing is pure, seamless intimacy, made of one ever-present
substance, made only of itself.
In experience there is no time or space. It is too utterly, intimately itself to admit of any
distance or otherness. This intimacy, this absence of distance or otherness, is known as
love. Experience would first have to imagine itself to be made of objects, selves, others
and things, and thus forget its own reality – which it knows, as it were, without knowing
it – to be able to imagine such a time and place.
Does the substance of experience ever appear or disappear? That is, does experiencing
ever have the experience of its own appearance or disappearance? No! Into what would
it disappear and from what would it appear? Such a place would only be more
experiencing. To itself, therefore, experience is birthless and deathless.
Has experiencing ever had, or would it be possible for it to have, the experience of the
absence of, a change in or a cause for itself? No! All such concepts require a thought
that could imagine something other than experience’s own experience of itself, which is
always only now and this. Only an imagined entity can seemingly know absence, change
or causation.
Experiencing itself is ever-present, homogeneous, self-knowing, self-luminous, self-
existent, uncaused, unmoving, unchanging. It knows nothing other than itself. It knows no
time or space, no objects or lack of objects, no cause or effect, no meaning, purpose or
destiny, no lack and no becoming. These are all mental abstractions, apparently
superimposed onto the ever-present, seamless intimacy of experience.
Experiencing itself, from its own point of view, cannot experience any lack or
inadequacy. It always knows only its own ever-present fullness – full of seamless,
indivisible experiencing alone. Therefore, experiencing knows itself as happiness and
fulfilment. It would take the arising of thought and the creation of an imaginary entity
(which was just a part of experience) for the sense of lack to be conceived or felt.
Likewise, experiencing itself, from its own point of view, can never be threatened and
is therefore fearless. It can never be agitated and is therefore peace itself. It knows
nothing other than or outside of itself and is therefore love itself. It knows no object and
is therefore beauty itself.
Fear, agitation, unhappiness, unease, otherness, separation, alienation, loneliness,
despair, hatred, unkindness, cruelty…all these require first the imagining of an entity
that is apart from the whole. This apparent fragmentation of experience into seeming
things, objects, entities, selves and the world makes time, space, duration, causation,
birth, death, decay and so on become seemingly real. However, they are only as real as
the entity that thinking imagines.
The incomprehensible beauty of this is that even this imagining is itself only made of
experiencing. Therefore, there is no true ignorance, no true ignoring of the nature of
reality.
Ignorance is ignorant only from the imagined point of view of ignorance. Experiencing
itself knows no ignorance. It knows only itself.
We do not need to give experiencing a name, nor could we give it a name that
adequately expresses what it is. At best, we could ascribe to it the sum total of all
possible names and even all possible words. That is the best the mind can do. Or we
could ascribe to it the simplest of all possible names, ‘I’.
Even all possible names and words would not be adequate. Thinking falls silent even in
attempting to look towards this ‘one’, let alone in attempting to name it. Thinking is
destroyed in the attempt, like a moth turning towards a flame. As it turns, it dies. It
cannot survive the light of experience.
Having seen this, we can look back at all the attempts of thinking to portray the nature of
experience accurately and, whilst we understand that these formulations may get more
and more subtle and that some may seem, temporarily and at a relative level, truer than
others, at the same time we recognise that ultimately none are true.
From the point of view of experiencing (which is, of course, not a point of view) all
points of view are made equally out of experiencing, and yet none adequately express it.
However, from the position of experiencing itself, thinking is no longer required to
approach it, because thinking can no longer get far enough away from it to stand back
and ‘have a look’, as it were. Where would thinking go? Where would it take its stand?
Only in its own imagination.
The mind as a separate entity, capable of distinguishing itself from, standing apart from
and conceptualising experience, dissolves in this understanding. That dissolution is the
true answer to all questions about the nature of experience.
Everything is too utterly, intimately, immediately, ever-presently and only made of
experiencing to be able to separate out one little part that could turn round and look at,
let alone conceive of, something objective called ‘experience’.
Water does not know the difference between ocean, wave, river, stream, cloud, rain and
tears; only the mind seems to know the difference. These differences only belong to
water from the mind’s point of view, which is only valid from its own point of view. In
reality, these differences pertain to the mind, not to water. They do not touch the water
itself. Water only knows itself, and it knows itself just by being itself.
As ‘ocean’, ‘wave’, ‘river’, ‘steam’, ‘cloud’, ‘rain’ and ‘tears’, water is apparent name
and form. As water, it is always only water.
Thinking loses its name and form here and stands revealed as it always only is, eternal
Presence, knowing, being and loving itself alone, until the next river of words gently
bubbles up…
PUBLICATIONS BY RUPERT SPIRA

The Transparency of Things – Contemplating the Nature of Experience

Non-Duality Press 2008
Sahaja Publications 2016

Presence, Volume I – The Intimacy of All Experience

Non-Duality Press 2011
Sahaja Publications 2016

The Ashes of Love – Sayings on the Essence of Non-Duality

Non-Duality Press 2013
Sahaja Publications 2016

The Light of Pure Knowing – Thirty Meditations on the Essence of Non-Duality

Sahaja Publications 2014
www.rupertspira.com